Pixel Meadow

I love my Dell Mini 9 Netbook. For the size and price of it, it’s a fantastic little machine. Marketing bumph will tell you Netbooks are for web surfing and email. Really this is all they’re powerful enough for (though I have ended up doing coding and DB admin on mine). The problem I find is the software to do this is designed with the old maxim of “screens will always get bigger”. Netbook screens are particularly limited in vertical height, so it’s unfortunate nearly all browsers waste a lot of screen space with various bits of “chrome” – Window borders, address bars, search bars, menus, tab bars, bookmark bars, etc…

screenshot of Firefox with some default toolbars

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a netbook optimised browser available? Something designed around the limitations of these small screens? I noted down a few ideas earlier about what I’d like to see in such a thing:

• As chromeless as possible – nothing getting in the way.
• Fullscreen - anything else is a waste on such a small screen
• Keyboard-driven – most Netbook trackpads suck, and you might not have a dedicated mouse with you, so make all functions simple using keyboard commands
• “Cloud” bookmarks – I hate syncing bookmarks between browsers, so use a service such as Delicious for storing our bookmarks
• Google Chrome’s Location/Search Bar – it’s awesome, so lets copy it :-) Auto integrates with our bookmark service
• Other Bits – Ad-blocker, offline storage (Gears?), etc…

A few doodles and screen grabs, and I ended up with this:

The default view has NO visable chrome, and is full screen. Sites scale to fit like on the iPhone

The combined Location/Search Bar is shown with ctrl-L (a bit like Launchy or Quicksilver)

Using ctrl-Tab will switch between open sites, with thumbnail previews to show where you are going.

Scroll a full page at a time, with a thumbnail preview

Now, I’m sure there’s nothing revolutionary about this at all, and I’m sure someone’s already thought about building this. Like me. In fact, if I can get my head around using WebKit in .NET, I’d like give (at least the basics of) this a try.

Note: Yes, I know Firefox and IE do fullscreen browsing (usually toggled with the F11 key), but personally I find these modes more of an after-thought, and – for me – don’t work too great. Others may disagree, but hey… But the fact these modes exist isn’t really the point.