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I was thinking of browsing in the way I'd browse a B&M bookshop not "I'm using a web browser therefore I'm browsing."
Obviously there are differences to do with the physicality of the experience but apart from that it's not that different. Nearly every day I'll go to Amazon, click the links to the Kindle store and have a look at what's new. I'll usually check out the daily deal. I might look at the Recommendations and what's new or upcoming. I might just look at the top 100. And probably do it all again under one of the genre categories I'm interested in.
I don't "narrow it down by search criteria" because I'm not looking for something specific (there are times when I am but I'm describing "browsing" right now) I just click through the lists letting the titles and/or covers jump out at me as they will. It doesn't feel like work. It's often something I do to take a quick break from work.
The other difference with B&M stores is that I know I'm not looking at all the books. In the old days I would pretty much scan all the books in the shelves I was interested in. But even then that was a small subset of what was actually available and the bookstop had filtered it for me based on what they thought would sell. In effect Amazon is doing the same by choosing what to put on the front page but if I did want to dive deep into something obscure I could.
So that's what I mean by browsing and I seem to be just as likely to have a "happy accident" discovery as I ever was as far as I can tell.
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