Cooliris - The New Way to Browse

A few years ago tabbed browsing became all the rage (or this year if you’re a Microsoft drone). I don’t know if Opera was first, but it was the first browser I saw with it. Other tricks and treats have been put forward since then to be the next big enhancement to browsing, but until Cooliris, none could take the crown.

Intriguingly, Cooliris is counter-operative to tabs. One of the drawbacks of tabs is they can create poor browsing habits, with surfers clicking multiple pages open in tabs to “read later”, or to trawl through to find the page they really want. Who hasn’t command-clicked several links in Google and then spent time looking at each. Those days are past with Cooliris.

Cooliris lets you preview web pages without opening them. When you hover the mouse pointer over a link, it opens the page in a popup window. And, within a second of moving your mouse out of the Cooliris window, it closes automatically. If though, you move your mouse over another link on the original page, Cooliris will automatically preview that page. Therefore you can very quickly browse pages to find the one you want. You can also browse within Cooliris’s popup window. If you like a page you’re previewing, you hit the button in Cooliris’s toolbar to open that page in your browser. The Cooliris window is resizable. Cooliris also adds some command-click extensions for searching Google.

It should be noted that Cooliris isn’t a popup window in the advertising sense, so is not affected by your browser’s popup blocking.

Cooliris is available for Safari, FireFox and, if you’re marooned on Internet Explorer for Windows, it too.

In Firefox, Cool Iris adds an extra target area to links that you have to hover over which can be a bit fiddly but I prefer that to the Safari way which is the link itself, as, in Firefox you can then control more easily which links you want to preview.

The Safari implementation is faster, slicker and sexier than the Firefox version but doesn’t work on many pages and lacks the command-click extensions. Whereas the Firefox version works on most links on most pages.

But they all work on Google where Cooliris is most useful as it allows you to rapidly browse search results by simply previewing the pages.

Cooliris is still in beta for Safari and has a few quirks in Firefox but since using Cooliris, I’m often finding I’m ending up with considerably less tabs open - which is a very good thing.

Cooliris has revolutionized my browsing habits and I can’t live without it now. Try it it, because you’ll find it’ll do the same for you. And it’s free! 9/10