more or less

There is a newly created My Opera group (Opera Blue Sky) whose aim is to poke and prod at the very future of web browsing. How do we want to be navigating the web in a few years? The current browser user interface is tired and old. They all have back/forward buttons. They now all have little squares which switch pages (tabs). They all use folders to manage pages you want to remember. There are some differences (which is why some of us use minority browsers like Opera), but the main metaphor is largely unchanged.

Anyway, this is really just a pointer to a little poke at the future that we've been debating for many years in the Opera community, letting access points take over the world browser. Apple have initiated a patent on navigating your browsing history using what are really just access points (remember how M2 can dynamically make relelvant entries into your mail mountain). Several of us Opera users have been suggesting to expand the access point to other parts of the browser UI for years. The original post on Opera Blue Sky is here (also quoted below):

Read more here…

With Opera 7 came a great revolution hidden in an obscure place: dynamic search available through things called "access points" in M2. Once we brethren saw it, we knew it was good. The long-overdue assault on the folder had begun, and as in any war, there was (and still is) much resistance to change. Static folders are comforting, they do what they are told. I put A into B and it stays there. Unfortunately I can't put it into C without copying it, then if I want to edit it I have to do so in two places repetitively and so on. Folders are inefficient and inflexible. They are inferior. Access points can behave like folders, but do much much more. But to benefit from an access point, we need sufficient information to allow the access point the ability to store what we want.

So if we only have a title to a page, that says "Apples are great", we don't know from the title alone if that page belongs to a food category or a computer category. But if we can index the page content then that ambiguity is gone (hint: Kestrel does that now).

So when I saw this patent:

Apple Patent Hints at Future Navigational Interface

I saw there a technology I've been using for years applied to page history; access points. Sorting things in piles dynamically based on categories is what access points do. Indeed, I can do that manually now in Kestrel by using opera:historysearch?q=MY_TOPIC saved as a bookmark, but I want an interface to store my access points more elegantly than that. And I want a "Top 10" for word frequency for my page history. That makes Apple's patent trivial.