As I'm sure you've noticed by now, Socialbrowse has undergone a major makeover. And not only did the website get a great new look, but many aspects of the browser extension have been improved to match. The motivations behind this new look were 1) Usability, 2) Branding, and 3) Prettiness.

We've gotten a tremendous amount of user feedback since launching our private beta, and we've also observed how everyone has used Socialbrowse. That helped us determine what is most important within the site, and how we can make the important stuff easier to access and use. Additionally, we felt that Socialbrowse needed more of an identity and image. Our resulting logo, color scheme, and extension functions all form a much more consistent brand and an improved look overall.

Our website redesign centers around the new logo and color scheme. We've taken pains to keep a clean and minimalist feel with plenty of whitespace. We formatted the profile pages to emphasize the most important content (shares, comments, messages) in an enlarged main column, with a sidebar containing more information about that user. The sidebar holds the edit/follow/stop-following buttons, their social points, the users they are following, their fans, and your own recent visitors.

The main column focuses around the user's name, pic, bio and shared content. These shared items have been condensed into a single tabbed container, letting you quickly browse all of the user's content within a single "feed", or filter the content by links, comments, or messages. We've made the message box more prevalent so you can easily send notes to other users, and we've provided a search box quickly find a particular item. Finally, you can sort the content by category by clicking a category link underneath any shared item. Double-clicking a tab resets the content.


Along with the website redesign, the browser extension's embedded content has been cleaned up to match. The embedded icons have been converted to be the Socialbrowse icon itself, rather than each user's picture. The reason for this swap was feedback that the user pictures were indecipherable at that size, and thus not noticeable. The new embedded icon is more consistent and thus easily recognizable yet unintrusive. If multiple people have shared the link, the icon still shows how many shares that link has gotten. When you hover over an icon, the expanded information has a cleaner, more pleasant style.

Finally, the in-page comments and feed popups have been made over to match the embedded icon expansions. The commenting toolbar button has been simplified so that you can view and submit comments with a single click of the button, and the in-page comment box can be toggled close by clicking the button again.

We appreciate all of your feedback we've for this new design. We've already tweaked the results in response to your feedback, including making the fans/following pictures in the profile bigger, providing more of them per user, and making the shared content in the profile easier to see and distinguish. Expect to see many more improvements over the coming weeks.

Thanks again for continuing to make Socialbrowse great!