Browsing the web on the iPhone is great — page scaling works wonderfully with the high-resolution screen, and Safari Touch (or Mobile Safari, if you like) is well-designed and makes reading in bed or on the bus a breeze. But there’s one thing that irks me: no easy way to open a link in a new window. When you’re browsing blog posts, Wikipedia articles, or, really, any webpage, it quickly becomes limiting to browse the Web in a linear fashion. If you’re like me, there’s some unease associated with trying to remember all the links you wanted to follow on a page. You want to finish reading the page you’re on, but that becomes more difficult as your working memory fills up with all the links you wanted to click further up. By the time you get to the bottom of the page, you’ve forgotten what they were, and you have to go reread from the top. The quickest way around the problem on the iPhone is to open a new page, open History, load the same page again and find the link you want. But that’s inconvenient and less than ideal.

But we’ve a better idea. Two, actually. In our traditionally constructive approach, here’s how ‘Open Link in New Window’ could work on the iPhone.

Click-and-Hold

The trick is in the click-and-hold. On iPhones and iPods Touch, touching a link and not releasing your finger brings up a little callout box with link text and URL, if available.

The Solution

Here’s where we step in. There are two ways, using another finger, that we could imagine opening a new window. The first requires no interface adjustments: just use another finger to hit the ‘Multiple Windows’ button in the lower right, and a new window is opened from that link.

Our second solution contextualizes the ‘New Window’ button by making it even closer to the link: it’s a button in the callout box itself.

If you don’t want to open a new window, and just want to follow the hyperlink, you’d just release your finger and the page would load in the same window, as it does now.

Admittedly, opening links in new windows isn’t the sort of thing every user does (on purpose), even on a desktop computer. The introduction of tabs has undoubtedly affected behavior in that direction, but it’s still the sort of feature that many people won’t miss. On the other hand, we might be willing to wager that the kind of user that has adopted the iPhone is the kind of user that opens multiple links in tabs. But the relatively hidden nature of the functionality in our proposal means there isn’t really a downside: the feature is conveniently tucked away where only those who will use it will see it. For those curious enough to click and hold a link, they’ll likely recognize the ‘New Window’ icon and experiment with it.

We tossed around other ideas (gestures, using the same finger to move to the ‘New Window’ button in the callout), but nothing seemed as natural and obvious as using the existing button. There aren’t any exact analogs to this sort of multi-touch functionality currently, but if you see the multi-touch page and photo zooming functions as “manipulation” actions, then this is a sort of manipulation itself — you’re performing an action on the link. Furthermore, the click-and-hold gesture brings up a loupe when editing text — it’s a sort of “closer look” to specify where you want to place the cursor. Similarly, click-and-hold on a hyperlink is a way to look closer at that link: it functions this way currently, showing you the URL. The addition of a ‘New Window’ button offers the choice of specifying how the link is opened.

So, there you have it: ‘Open in New Window’ for Safari Touch. Any alternative proposals?

Follow Sakuzaku on Twitter. Click here.