TreeBrowser: what if Mozilla looked like this?

maybe some of you have heard about Mozilla Labs Design Challenge Summer 2009. the main topic of this contest is to form the new vision and the new mechanism of navigation. oldschool tabs are not enough for the modern web-user: there are lots of bugs and bad sides of the casual tabbing. besides - tabs give a rather poor vision of the history of navigation and following the links or sublinks.

from this point of view an interesting example is given by one of the participants via post and video on Habrahabr. this is the case when the mechanism of web-hierarchy is the best way released, as for me. I tried demo-version written on Delphi for showing the new navigation - it works great! of course, this is a concept which only shows one side of the browsers usability. but this can be a huge step forward, claimed by a Russian developer afan from Moscow, working for the Evernote Corporation (as it is declared in his profile).

English video description:

Imagine there are no “tabs”, no “browser history”, and no back/forward stack. Instead, there is one single space of the web sites that you visit, with direct relationships, or paths, between pages. Each page is represented with its thumbnail, and all such pages live in a single space which can be freely zoomed, panned and rearranged. Such view is very similar to “mind maps” which people often create specifically to understand the subject better. But what if the browser would create such mind maps or, as I call them, “browsemaps” for you like a magic?

Browsemaps is a visually rich way to percieve information (browsing history, available pages, how did one get to the particular page). They reduce cognitive load, so that user does not have to keep everything in her head. They should be easy to understand for non-techie users, and, lastly, browsemaps are fun!

With such approach, users don't have to choose between opening the page in the same window vs. opening the page in a new tab — browsers can handle this by keeping all most recently opened pages in a cache of separate browser instances, so you can allways return to any previous browser state quickly (no difference between browser history and open pages). If you need to go to another page, just type in the new URL and don't bother about preserving the previous browser window.

When you go to a previously used page (by entering URL or clicking a link), the browser will not create a duplicate instance of the page on the map; instead, it will highlight and scroll to the existing page. This way, you instantly see all you browsing history for that page, its parent, sister and children pages.

Russian video description: