2012. Empirical.
Stateless was an experiment in rethinking the web browser for touch-based interfaces.
We did away with all the traditional chrome and focused on browsing and workflow. The most important change was two have two main screens: a visualization of our history and the zoomed in actual webpages themselves.
The overview, first pictured here, provides a much more visual way to literally see what we've been browsing, not just scroll through them in a giant list. Clustering around 'sessions', we can toggle back and forth between different searches or research activities to create piles that represent the actual time spent on any page, as well as any other meaningful attribute such as being marked interesting or snoozed. Because of the size of the tiles we can add additional visual indications such as logos or include dominate photos that represent a given page.
The name, Stateless, implies that we have the ability to freely flow between pages across clusters zooming in and out of them. Once inside, the typical chrome is replaced in favor of a simple header that includes the only controls: share, snooze, and marking a page as interesting. The share itself works with a built in list of friends such that the most common people in your life are a quick tap away. Snoozing provides the ultimate workflow of bringing pages back when you have time, and interesting provides lightweight bookmarking without forcing organization or curation of some giant mega-list because the context is always preserved (the larger session).
We want the ability to visually navigate back and forth by having the context above and the history below, supporting simple direct manipulation-centric taps to the content we wanted. Thus you see where you came from in the space above the current page, and as you click on further links they come up from the bottom occupying the new majority spot. It is easy to go back and forth between pages without loosing visual context where you came from or where you're going.