I first heard the term "contextual browsing" from the CEO of Cooliris. The guys that have the cool plug in called 3d wall where you can slide your browser window around like an iphone or android device that is zoomed in on a page. So forgive me if this is now called something else, as I tried to pull a reference for this it doesn't seem to exist. So for now what I'm about to discuss is the ability to move around a web page by clicking and dragging the page.
Why is this important, well if you live in a cave, the Ipad has just been released which is in essence a tablet version of the iphone for browsing the web. Google is already discussing their upcoming android version for a tablet. Some skeptics would say...so what. I say nay nay, pay attention because the box your browser is about to change big time!
I thought about this as I was playing around with the Android software in a virtual machine set up. To be honest I was looking for a way to play Parallel Kingdom on my laptop, but that that didn't work out. But, as I was sliding the pages around in a bigger screen than my Android phone, and surfed the web, sliding the browser around even with it larger felt right. In fact after I shut off the virtual machine and went back to my regular web browser I found myself overwhelmingly frustrated that i had to click slider bars on the side of my browser to move the page. This all of a sudden seemed so yesterday's technology.
So now we have the Ipad and the upcoming other tablets with the same contextual / multitouch browsing with larger screens. Let's think about what that means because now a website doesn't need home pages, and other pages. They need a landing view and then you slide to the area you want to look at. Navigation becomes more about topography - what is visible to the eye zoomed out and then what is seen zoomed in. Or what catches the eye in a fast flick to the right or left.
I don't think these new tablets will replace the laptop. I like the keyboard and my screen at 60 degrees up as opposed to typing on a flat surface. But I think you will see a change in the browsing experience as a whole as popularity grows in these tablet devices. Using mouse gestures or dragging web sites will become more common.
It seems that the days of the locked in 1024px width website is gone, now it can be a 1,000,000,000,000,000px width - it just won't matter. Style sheets and layering for placement to fit in different browsers on different OS's, on different browser versions, all to fit ideally into the box you see as a browser window today will seem inconsequential. If an image expands 5 pixels in IE more than Firefox - well it won't be 15 hour day for the designer trying to write scripting and style sheets to make it look great in so many scenarios. Now let it go, screw it, I have basically infinity to expand my website out - top, bottom, left, right, even diagonally.
The challenges will definitely be rethinking a sites topography layout to navigate. The beauty of say CoolIris in searching through images. You spin it and let your subconscious mind stop the spin when it sees a close enough match within the blur of color. Bam, you click your mouse and you found the image exactly what you were looking for. You're mind did not have to process anything but raw imagery in color and shape to find what you were looking for. If I were looking for an image of a Ferarri amongst millions of pictures, when I spin the wall I look for {red, triangular shape,, etc.} When i see anything close to that I slow down the spin, if it matches closer to {sports car, logo, the Ferrari font}, until I stop quickly on the image I'm looking for.
If we were to change the way we build the web to accommodate a more topography navigation, we would literally have to have landmarks in our content to catch the user's eyes to quicken their navigation. Think of it as crop circles at 2000 ft. Wow, there look at that. Zoom in.
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