It's a Vision Thing

Internet browsing has always been a linear activity. You access a page, click some links, and use the Forward and Back buttons to revisit pages. Browse3D 1.5 ($29.95 direct) makes browsing a more visual experience and lets you access more than one page at a time. Although it requires that Internet Explorer be installed on your machine, this browser has its own interface.

Browse3D takes the visual metaphor to an extreme by presenting you with three walls set up like a three-way mirror. In the center panel, you see the active page, which looks very much like most browsers. The left panel, which bleeds off the left-hand side of your screen, keeps a visual history of the pages you've visited (up to 32) in the form of screenshots.

The behavior of the right panel depends on how you configure Browse3D. If Auto Crawl is on (the default state), Browse3D acts like a minispider, checking the links in the page displayed on the center wall and showing a screenshot for each on the right wall. If you're on a slower connection, you may want to shut off Auto Crawl and use the Forward Crawl Link feature to manually select the pages for which screenshots appear on the right wall. You can also make the right wall a Sticky Wall—a wall, saved for later retrieval, that holds pages you have visited. For example, you could create a news Sticky Wall containing news organization Web pages. Retrieving Sticky Walls, however, is slow, even on a broadband connection.

This is indeed a new and interesting way of browsing, but the speed of your connection and the configuration of your machine have a tremendous impact on the speed at which Browse3D presents information. Browse3D deserves kudos for the depth of its vision and for pushing browser design to a new level, but with Microsoft Internet Explorer's dominance and Netscape 7.0 just out, this company will be fighting an uphill battle to gain market share.