Making A Better Browser History

jbtule writes "Students at the University of Illinois have released TrailBlazer, a new user interface to represent your web browsing history. It lays out the pages you visit in a simple 2D map with thumbnails and summaries. The project took 2nd place at the university's annual Engineering Open House and a three minute video is available that demonstrates TrailBlazer for those who don't have Mac OS X Panther. TrailBlazer is implemented with Apple's WebKit on a bare bones browser, but this interface would probably be more useful if it were added to a real browser. This is a much better history than chronological lists of web page titles or crazy cubes floating around a 3D space. Hopefully Safari or /insert favorite web browser/ will do something similar in the future."

Comments

The cyberspatial compass

[Space cowboy]

This is a great idea - a visualisation of the underlying data in a form far easier to recognise than the data itself. Humans tend to react better to visual stimuli (think a map vs a series of co-ordinates, and try to work out which location is farther away from you). Kudos to the authors for the inspiration.

This new idea tells us where we are in a better, easier-to-use way, and we like that. It can tell us where we can go/have been, and tracks the paths between these nodes on our cyberspatial plane [grin, sounds a bit OTT, but..]. Perhaps a cyberspatial compass combined with a cyberspatial GPS system. CPS perhaps :-)

It's also interesting to see that the 'cool idea' is something to aid the browsing experience, not to replace it. It seems we're happy with the idea of 'click here, go there', but want more intuitive or rememberable (is that a word?) cues for the journey itself...

Simon

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[Anonymous Coward]

I speak for the properties of love. That's why you just talked about me, baby...

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[wiggys]

Yeah yeah great idea... shame about the reality.

In my experience, every single attempt to recreate a heirarchical system (be it a file system, database or in this instance a browser history) fails utterly because it doesn't adhere to the K.I.S.S. principle.

Virtual Reality (oh that is sooo 1990s!) systems often make things much more complicated to use no matter what the graphics are like... it's very easy to get lost in VR space, you have no concept of "up" or "down" (no horizon, no gravity) and trying to control your view quickly and effectively using a keyboard and mouse is very tricky, unless you're a seasoned Descent player.

However, arranging the history in a 2d manner (such as the tree view mentioned here) seems a far better way of going about it - everything you need is within your field of view, arrange in a consistent way (eg all rectangles are same size... unlike a 3d view where they appear to be smaller as they are further away) and you can tell at a glance what the relationship is.

2d vs 3d - It's kinda like the view a general gets on a battlefield (2d) versus the rather limited perspective a soldier has of the action (3d)

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[Anonymous Coward]

http://bash.org/?161714 some people call me the space cowboy yeaaaah some people call me the gangster of looove SOME PEOPLE CALL ME MAUUUURICE Some people want to hit you with a brick.

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[croddy]

sounds like something that will consume enormous amounts of CPU and memory, while at the same time causing the browser history to display about 75% less information on the screen, in 4 times the space.

a more useful implementation could rely on intelligently excerpting web pages, and tracking things like "did I submit a form here" or "did I start a download from this page"... the things we're really trying to remember when visiting our browsing history.

visual representations are often a crutch for when we simply cannot come up with anything else.

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[CoolVibe]

You mention Descent... I still get nausea and vertigo when I think about it. Thanks for the memory, bub.

:)

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[Anonymous Coward]

that will consume enormous amounts of CPU and memory

Go back to your days of timesharing on a University mainframe. The rest of us don't mind using a couple hundred gigs to get some real work done.

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[Doooh_head]

Looks cool and everything, but just from viewing the demo, the biggest problem with it is that it will potentially consume soooo much desktop space that hardware developers will have to come up with some way of scrolling left and right in addition to up and down, just to accomodate seeing everything as efficiently as possible. Scrolling is a big pain in the @$$, thats why they came up with a "wheel mouse". Whats next, a "2-wheel mouse"? Hey haven't I seen that before???

Everything on Apple's "wants" to be graphical. Thats its roots, but until viewable screen realestate increases, to me, it is just useless!

Been there done that, didn't buy the t-shirt!

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[Anonymous Coward]

"Teenage tit-freaks" DVD-rips at 720p might not be considered "real work" elsewhere. But yes, I agree ;)

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[Anonymous Coward]

Scrolling is a big pain in the @$$, thats why they came up with a "wheel mouse". Whats next, a "2-wheel mouse"? Hey haven't I seen that before???

You probably have, I've seen one but I don't remember it's name

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[Eccles]

Whats next, a "2-wheel mouse"? Hey haven't I seen that before???

IBM came out with a mosue with one of those controls that looks like a pencil eraser where a scroll wheel would be. Then another company came out with a mouse with two wheels: one vertical, one horizontal. Now Microsoft has their tilt-wheel tech, where you can press on the wheel to scroll side to side.

I think I like the Microsoft implementation best. The IBM concept made it difficult not to get some sideways scrolling when you scroll vertically, and the two-wheel design requires more doohickeys.

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[digitaleus]

Actually, our minds are primarily visual and spatial. Espeically those of us who ain't coders.

I imagine that it'd be pretty easy to recognise the site you were on last week by its branding in a thumbnail - assume it wasn't black text on a white background :p

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[mblase]

sounds like something that will consume enormous amounts of CPU and memory, while at the same time causing the browser history to display about 75% less information on the screen, in 4 times the space.

I'd agree, if this weren't built using OS X Panther. This browser history map uses thumbnails (and if those thumbnails aren't resizable, they should be in the next version) and simple arrows, probably using the same basic technology as iPhoto 4 does. OS X handles resizable icons and thumbnails as part of the underlying OS; they probably didn't have to create nearly as much code as you might expect.

a more useful implementation could rely on intelligently excerpting web pages, and tracking things like "did I submit a form here" or "did I start a download from this page"... the things we're really trying to remember when visiting our browsing history.

If you submitted a form on page A, then page A+1 will usually indicate that you've done so in some way (at least if the UI designers did their job). I don't think it'll be that hard to deduce if you've downloaded a file from a particular page, either, since it's usually the visual thumbnail of the page you remember rather than the data you got after visiting it.

visual representations are often a crutch for when we simply cannot come up with anything else.

I hope you were using a text-only web browser and a command-line OS when you wrote that. If GUIs are a crutch, then nearly every computer user for the last twenty years is a permanent cripple.

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[skirch]

You make a couple good points, but that last line really bugs me. Are you serious? I know what you mean: people use charts and graphs in situations they shouldn't. But you should qualify that by pointing out that it's only because people don't use them properly. I can go on and on about my data all day long, or I could show you a picture, and you could understand instantly. (You might say that without a paragraph of explanation, you'd never be able to understand the graphic, but the original version has a couple sentences to describe what you're looking at. As a crutch, shall we say, to the graphic.)

What about a system that combines a thumbnail of the site with your excerpt and statistics? If I'm looking for a site that I recently visited, it's going to save me a lot of time if I can look for that bright green background I remember instead of reading a synopsis for each site...

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[yerfatma]

Thanks for the laugh and the reminder that, at one time, Dennis Miller was funny.

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[trs998]

Ive got that. I played it for about 3 hours, thinking that i'd get used to it. I didnt, and spent the next 2 days with a headache whenever I thought about it. The hardest bit was flying into a large room, having a bit of a fight, then spending the next 10 minutes trying to work out which of the 5 door you came in.
One copy of descent 3 for sale... hardly used!

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[aWalrus]

Yeah... At first I thought it was something like the newsmap, with different sizes for frequency of visits (i.e., Fark and Slashdot would show up huge in mine). That might be a great way to represent this kind of information. As it it, I don't see it as being a killer app.

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[djdavetrouble]

Amen brother. I never made it to descent 3, I tried descent when I finished doom, and it instantly triggered severe vertigo and dizziness. They should have a warning on the box of that fucking game: If you have ever gotten motion sickness don't even think of buying this game. If you get dizzy easily, do NOT buy this game.

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[qengho]

I still get nausea and vertigo when I think about [Descent].

Oh yeah, but it wasn't as bad as Alien vs. Predator, playing as the alien. My wife couldn't even be in the same room as the monitor.

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[raverbuzzy]

Isn't that diagram a scan from Edward R. Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information"

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[System.out.println()]

I'd agree, if this weren't built using OS X Panther. This browser history map uses thumbnails (and if those thumbnails aren't resizable, they should be in the next version) and simple arrows,

From the few minutes I tested TrailBlazer with, it seems that they resize automatically when you visit more pages. There is also a "minimum" and "maximum" thumbnail size in preferences, but they don't go lower than 150. At the size I have it right now (about 10 pages), the display fits about 5x3 pages in a relatively small area. As long as the old History is also accessible, IMO this is ready to implement in a browser such as Safari.

I wonder if it would be as simple as copying some .nib files from TB into Safari? I know that iCAR adds a prefpane to iChat that adds functionality - maybe by copying some files from TrailBlazer into Safari's History window file we could already implement this? it's a long shot, but hey... I'll play with it and report back if it actually works.

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds like something that will consume enormous amounts of CPU and memory, while at the same time causing the browser history to display about 75% less information on the screen, in 4 times the space.

I'd agree, if this weren't built using OS X Panther. This browser history map uses thumbnails (and if those thumbnails aren't resizable, they should be in the next version) and simple arrows, probably using the same basic technology as iPhoto 4 does. OS X handles resizable icons and thumbnails as part of the underlying OS; they probably didn't have to create nearly as much code as you might expect.

What does that have to do with anything? The code will take the same resources no matter who wrote it. You either have to eat up lots of memory storing images of each page, or you have to eat up CPU time rerendering each page in miniature. You have to have code that does this SOMEWHERE, and the OS can't just do some magic to make it all go away.

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[shotfeel]

Whats next, a "2-wheel mouse"?

It was recently noted that Apple has filed a patent for what is sounds like an optical scroll wheel -no moving parts, you just slide your finger up or down over the "window". There's no reason it couldn't be made two-dimensional, essentially a mini trackpad on the top of the mouse used for scrolling.

How does that sound?

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[Doooh_head]

Are you talking about what alot of laptops currently have for a "mouse"? That square panel you slide your finger over? I HATE those damn things!

I hope I see in my lifetime a "mouse-less" revolution take place, where (perhaps) the cursor on screen is controled not by one of our hands, but by our eyes. Ya, that's the ticket!

It has always pissed me off to have to switch your one hand from the mouse to the keyboard. Thats why I make the attempt to learn the keystrokes for common activities, in whatever application I am using, instead of relying on the mouse alternatives. Using the mouse slows you down!

Gee I miss command lines...:-\

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[System.out.println()]

Actually, the inverse would be more useful for History. How often do you need to go to History to look up Fark or Slashdot? Hopefully "Never" - these sites should therefore be very small in such a window.
The sites you need to go to History for are usually the sites you went to once and forgot; those, if anything, should be bigger.

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you can't actually use the program, but it does excerpt the webpages and displays a summary in a tooltip when you hover over a page. I'm sure it would be simple to add an option to display the summaries instead of thumbnails.

The program does use a lot of memory (I've been playing with it for a few minutes, and it's already up to 67MB resident), but I'd bet that has more to do with its caching that with the memory consumed by the thumbnails. This is a proof-of-concept, not a production app.

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[mblase]

The code will take the same resources no matter who wrote it.

Wrong. Code to do the same job can have vastly different resource requirements, depending on how well-optimized it is.

You have to have code that does this SOMEWHERE, and the OS can't just do some magic to make it all go away.

True, but when the process is part of the basic OS you have many advantages of speed and resource consumption -- especially resource consumption, if the code you need to do a thing is already loaded into memory as soon as your OS starts up.

Y'know how IE usually loads faster than Mozilla or Opera on Windows? That's because most of the operating code for IE is loaded by Windows before you even start the browser.

You don't have to "eat up CPU time rerendering each page in miniature" if your OS can take a PNG or PDF snapshot of the page the first time it loads and convert that into a tiny thumbnail in a cache somewhere.

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[timeOday]

I'll go you one further.. I think all these attempts to make fancy browser histories are just bloat. I ocassionally use the back button to go back one or two steps, but that's about it, and tabs have mostly replaced the need to jump back and forth at all.

Of course I can only speak for myself. Anybody out there interested in extensive browser history?

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[shotfeel]

that square panel you slide your finger over?

Something like that, only optical IIRC. Just like a trackball is essentially an upside down mechanical mouse, this works like an optical mouse. So turn your mouse over (assuming its optical) and give it a try (OK that doesn't work all that well...).

The "new" mouse would have the "normal" optical mouse features with an optical "trackpad" also included on top. Hopefully it will be much better than current trackpads.

the cursor on screen is controled not by one of our hands, but by our eyes.

Don't know if I want the cursor covering what I'm trying to look at ;-)

Actually, one of my professors from way back was working on a system like this primarily for use by handicapped people. In its rudimentary form its used by advertising agencies and the like to determine what part of the ad people actually look at (believe it or not, its the half-naked woman, not can of cola).

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you try communicating that idea again without using any text, or speech?

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you talking about what alot of laptops currently have for a "mouse"? That square panel you slide your finger over? I HATE those damn things!
No, those pads replace the mouse - so you are moving the cursur with them. The scroll pad will use the same technology to detect you finger movement, but it will only scroll you document - NOT move the cursor, you still have the mouse itself for cursor control. and since it is 2D (instead of 1D like the wheels) you can scroll vertical/horizontal or both at once

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[Mikeydude750]

Or...a glove you wear that you move your hand to move the cursor(Minority Report, anyone?).

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[dbc001]

Agreed. This is very interesting stuff from a research point of view, but it needs a lot of testing before it gets added as standard in all the browsers. simple 1-dimensional history works just fine, and as the parent said, tabbed browsing fixes most of the problems with the current setup.

While we're on the subject of browsers, can anyone tell me why modern browsers still use caching? I've been moving a lot of profiles around lately, and those 5,000 1k files are *killer* on file transfers. (i always forget to delete them) is there any real reason to have a cache at all? is there any reason not to limit it to like 1 Meg?

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[thestoffer]

Sounds like an idea I wrote about on my weblog about a month ago. Why not just make an app which read the history file and uppon cmd+alt+tab views miniaturized versions of the history tree in a manner similar to the way you can select running applications by pressing cmd-tab. I get stuck trying to get my app to get the per-window history via applescript and ~/Library/Safari/History.plist doen't contain info of which window the history is for :-/

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[commodoresloat]

However, arranging the history in a 2d manner (such as the tree view mentioned here) seems a far better way of going about it

How is this different from what Trailblazer does?

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[timeOday]

I haven't tried disabling disk caching, I can't imagine anything really bad would happen but whether it would be noticeable I don't know. I would be kind of interesting if browsers reported statistics on their cache hit rate.

As for copying lots of small files, I've found scp -r isn't very efficient because there's a per-file overhead, and it works better to stream all the files together like so: tar -cvzf - dir | ssh remotehost 'tar -xzf -'

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[fyonn]

until viewable screen realestate increases, to me, it is just useless!

23" Apple Cinema Display

dave

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[fyonn]

I hope I see in my lifetime a "mouse-less" revolution take place, where (perhaps) the cursor on screen is controled not by one of our hands, but by our eyes. Ya, that's the ticket!

wouldn't that suck badly for quake3? there's a few applications for which you don't follow the mouse pointer with your eyes.

dave

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[Doooh_head]

wouldn't that suck badly for quake3? there's a few applications for which you don't follow the mouse pointer with your eyes.

Perhaps you're right. For games there needs to be a different, better controller. It just frustrates the hell out of me having to move my hand from my mouse to the keyboard, over and over.

Wow, I'm starting to sound like a broken record...Doooh!

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[4of12]

This browser history map uses thumbnails

Seems like some Web pages would be visually cued using thumbnails better than others (eg, large chunks of distinct color blocks vs. straight text).

I'd like a history sidebar that showed a directed graph layed out in 2D, but perhaps using favicons to represent the nodes.

And, of course, there's the issue of how to make it meaningful with tabs, which I use a lot.

The Real Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Do people actually use their browser history for anything other than:

a) Checking up on shared computers' other users porn-browsing habits

b) Tracking the links they've visited in the past.

Personally, I have a 25 meg history file going back I'm-not-sure-how-far which I keep around just so that links I've visited are a different colour.

Re:The Real Question

[pbjones]

unfortunately I do use my browser history to back-track through sites when researching aircraft etc. but I should be more organised.

Re:The Real Question

[bitchell]

Thats a valid point. Surely the instead of making the history look better why not concentrate on making favourites look cool and a lot easy to manage / take with you on the move.

Re:The Real Question

[cubic6]

I don't really use my browser history much, thanks to tabbed browsing and favorites. Tabs work in the short term, and favorites in the long term. I'd much rather keep track of past-visited sites with an organized, categorized list of hand-picked sites instead of a chronological pile of probably about 100 sites a day that I passed through. I also clear my history about once every 3 days for security purposes.

Re:The Real Question

[aflat362]

Sometimes I need to get back to a site I was at before but have no idea what the URL was. The browser history has helped me out several times to get back to the page. Given, it is not a regular activity occurring at most a couple of times a month. But it is a feature I occasionally use for things other than you have mentioned.

Not sure what you mean by "track the links they've visited in the past?" Are you picturing someone enter this information in a spreadsheet or something? I'm not thinking this is a common usage of the browser history.

Re:The Real Question

[Anonymous Coward]

I also clear my history about once every 3 days for security purposes.

That's how often your mom cleans your room, isn't it.

Re:The Real Question

[Midnight Thunder]

Do people actually use their browser history for anything other than:

a) Checking up on shared computers' other users porn-browsing habits

b) Tracking the links they've visited in the past.


Fair point. Though sometime the way we use something also depends on the praticality of the tool used to make use of it. It is highly possible that we limit our use of the browser history because in its current form it is not really pratical to be used other wise. If the information appears as too much noise, then we will try to limit our exposure to the noise.

Of course whether the this alternative method makes a difference remains to be seen. Hypercard had also provided a visual history, but it was much more linear.

Re:The Real Question

[Anonymous Coward]

By tracking visited links, I meant knowing that I've already followed a link to, say, a news article on a website earlier that day/week, so there's no point in clicking it again.

Re:The Real Question

[cbirdsong64]

Maybe the reason you don't is that it's kind of a pain in the ass to check.

Re:The Real Question

[Anonymous Coward]

But why would I want to use my history? I can happily bookmark and file away any site I think I'll want to return to.

I can see history being useful to, say, autobookmark sites one visits frequently but hasn't bookmarked, but all that'd really accomplish is bookmarking people's favourite porn sites, and those who would be unwilling to bookmark such in the first place don't want that to happen anyway.

The browsing I did yesterday has nothing whatsoever to do with the browsing I'll do today, save for fifteen or so different news sites. And they're loaded via three 'collection of related tabs' bookmarks.

I maintain that browser histories are solely useful to tell us whether or not we've already followed a link we won't want to follow again.

Thumbnails?

[Short Circuit]

Am I the only one who doesn't want to be reminded of some of the sites he's seen? Like *cx?

Re:Thumbnails?

[jetfuel]

Hey, I live at rubicon.cx, you insensitive clod!

Re:Thumbnails?

[markxsd]

Anyone else done a public demo of a web application and seen www..com being autocompleted in the address box as you type???

Re:Thumbnails?

[ratpack91]

yeah! how about typing into google on my dad's computer while both parents are watching and seeing previous porn searches appear on the drop down menu. my mum utters an awkward laugh.
now whenever i come back from uni i always delete my dads search and site history before touching anything else.

Re:Thumbnails?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cleaning the mouse and keyboard might also be a good thing to do before touching anything else.

Opera's History

[skermit]

I don't have a problem with Opera's current implementation. Their quick and easy one button (F4) sidebar let's me quickly search by string for title, and arranges it by reverse chronological order. This allows me to quickly type in something like "google" in the filter, and show me every google search I've done in the past let's say 2 months. From this I can usually pick up any trail that I've lost and find a page that I've visited before with ease.

Re:Opera's History

[swapsn]

Yes, both F4 in Opera & Ctrl-H in FireFox are quite good.

But the problem is that the search is based on URL and page title. This becomes a problem if I am searching for some interesting bit on the web page, which is totally unrelated to the title (or the URL).

Free text search can help, but visual search seems to be much more intuitive. Or probably a combination of free text search and visual scanning...

I faced this problem sometime back, when I came across a very funny quote on a random web page. I was completely stumped when searching for the quote again some days later. The problem was excaberated by the fact that I didn't even remember the quote :(

Re:Opera's History

[sporty]

Does opera show you thumbnails or just a list of links? How does it show that you clicked from a-b-c then from a-d? Is there a way to see what a page looked like w/o clicking on the url?

Re:Opera's History

[74nova]

"no" to all of that, as i would assume you already know. however, i dont need any of that. like some other poster said, i keep pages i want to view reasonably soon in a tab and ones i really want to make sure i can find again in the bookmarks. if i need to find something, i can search the history. i dont need thumbnails. i suppose if you had dialup, that would really make a difference, tho. nothing wrong with this mac software in the article, i just dont have a need for it at all.

Re:Opera's History

[sporty]

They were all rhetorical questions ;) The only reason i liked the thumbnail idea, is that sometimes i'm on a blind search, and forget to bookmark something, i know it's in my history, just not the url by heart. it's useful for those "I know what the page looks like, just not the title" issues.

Re:Opera's History

[danila]

The problem is it doesn't scale well. If you set it to remember 5000 pages, it will take about 2-3 seconds to use quickfind on the history records. The interface would be nice if it actually worked. As it is, it's pretty useless. I find it easier and quicker to use the old html-based history to find something.

Re:Opera's History

[74nova]

"I know what the page looks like, just not the title"

huh, i spose so. i dont remember that ever happening to me, but if it does, that would be a useful tool.

Re:Opera's History

[System.out.println()]

I think that's the idea - this is basically a proof of concept, which is why the browser itself is so bare. It's up to some other browser maker (Mozilla.org or Apple, probably) to make it better.

Re:Opera's History

[UpnAtom]

A vastly cheaper way of doing it would be to track the time spent looking at / interacting with a page.
Most of the pages in my history, I spent less than a second looking at. The ones I go back for are usually ones I spent a lot of time reading.
Or they are any of the 50 pages I have open at any one time.

Re:Opera's History

[Anonymous Coward]

And this image based approach works better with 5000 pages?! I think not.

Relate-a-zon

[KrunZ]

This reminds me of the game Relate-a-zon that uses the Amazon's related items lists ("customers who bought this also bought...") to create a pathfinder game in which you have to use common sense and a bit of wild guessing to find your way from one product to another. In the end it visualizes your navigation in a url path graph.

Similar thing in 3D

[SpatialJ]

Clara has a similar approach. Here though, fully interactive thumbnails are stored in a spatial arrangement and can be relocated to your personal flavour.

OpenSource, scriptable, customizable ad infinitum integradete IRC for spatial use and finally a good reason besides games to have a fast graphics board

Videos and images available

I'd be happy with something even simpler...

[Realistic_Dragon]

If all text (tagged by URL) was dumped into one file per month and made searchable.

That way when I am trying to remember where I saw the instructions for the excell driving game shown on Slashdot earlier I would only have to search the text I have seen, not try and use google (too many hits) or search by thumbnails and page titles... useless since it was posted in a pretty much unrelated subject.

Re:I'd be happy with something even simpler...

[DrEldarion]

Well, you could always set your browser cache to a huge amount of space and never clear it.

Re:I'd be happy with something even simpler...

[Contact]

Hmm. It should be possible to do something like this using a proxy server, so it would work with any browser. Just hook something like Lucene in and index everything.

Plus, you could then get the proxy server to intercept certain pseudo-urls and treat them as search queries, so the whole system would be browser based and transparent to the user. ie - request something like http://history.search/ to show a search form, or something like http://quick.search/your+query+here to jump straight to results pages.

I could even see ISPs offering it as an optional service to customers, or businesses running it transparently... although there are obviously privacy concerns there.

Re:I'd be happy with something even simpler...

[robertchin]

Actually, the browser does save all text on every web page to the hard disk, and you can search the full text of the web pages you've visited in real time (as in, search as you type). It then filters out the history items based on the search text.

Re:I'd be happy with something even simpler...

[danila]

The problem is - no browser will work if you do that. Browsers were not designed for that and if you increase the cache too much, they break (or just start working very slowly). Not to mention that they don't have necessary search facilities built-in and using external search tools doesn't allow access to metainformation (when the page was opened, do you visit it often, where did you come to that page from, what links did you click there, etc.).

Re:I'd be happy with something even simpler...

[r5t8i6y3]

i've used something like this called mantadb under windows:

MantaDB v02.03 - MantaDB is a very useful
set of utilities for Microsoft Internet
Explorer. Included with MantaDB is a Web
Page Database that indexes the words that
on view in your browser, a utility to
check for dead links on web pages and
smaller utilities to numerous to mention.
From: Net 2000 Ltd. (Win95, 98 2000, NT4)

a similar windows product still under development is called hindsite

it is a bummer these are both windows only products. does anything like this exist for linux? i checked the mozilla extentions page and didn't see any such creature there.

ciao

Re:Very nice... aah, yes! yes! yes!

[word munger]

Ooh. A freudian typo: new "dimention"! It's so wrong.... but also so right!

prolly not

[aixou]

People may find immense visual interaction to be more appealing at first, but ime it can get cumbersome very fast.
My history is just that -- history.

If I want to go to a page I was already at, I'll most likely know when I went to it and can easily find it. This contrasts with Expose which helps you visually organize files currently being used.

I can see this having it's benefits (when I really need to find a poorly titled page), but I highly doubt it will redefine any standards.

Re:prolly not

[esarjeant]

This is an astute observation. My initial impression of TrailBlazer is that the thumbnail history can provide visual cues for navigating your browser history and that users will respond favorably to this because these pages will look familiar. Once there are a lot of pages (500-1000) it becomes more difficult for a user to spot the page they are looking for.

The application needs to provide a way to highlight pages that had significance. In other words, if you spend long enough on a particular page then it is fully colorized; otherwise, the page is slightly greyed out.

This is great stuff, btw. It's nice to see an application that was designed to solve a stated problem, there is clearly a niche here for a capability to help users manage historic web browsing better.

Re:prolly not

[aixou]

My initial impression of TrailBlazer is that the thumbnail history can provide visual cues for navigating your browser history and that users will respond favorably to this because these pages will look familiar. Once there are a lot of pages (500-1000) it becomes more difficult for a user to spot the page they are looking for.


And therein lies the problem. If you don't have very many pages in your history, you probably won't have any difficulty finding the page you're looking for in the first place. This leaves little application for Trailblazer -- not necessary for small amount of history, too cumbersome for larger amounts.

Re:prolly not

[djdavetrouble]

Somebody said:
somebody said:
I want to go to a page I was already at, I'll most likely know when I went to it and can easily find it.

This is usually true, but there is one page that I lost when I changed computers and forgot to move bookmarks. It was zyx.rt.ru or something and was sort of a technology opinion column with some great explorations. The best part was the photo of the week at the end. No matter what I google for I can't find that site! I guess history wouldn't have helped me tho, since I toasted that too. Will someone please post that url?!

Re:prolly not

[System.out.println()]

I like the graying out idea for pages that you didn't spend much time on - as long as you can turn it off (or around). On occasion I have to find a page that I just clicked by the first time.

To really guage (sp?) its usefulness TrailBlazer would have to be integrated into a normal browser, and used for an extended period of time... after which point the tester should be asked to find a specific site they visited at the beginning of the testing period. If they can find it quickly, then the concept is a success.

I wonder why they built a browser from scratch (sorta) instead of building it onto Firebird^H^H^H^Hfox or Camino or what have you. It does make it somewhat useless.

Re:prolly not

[povvell]

I think you mean http://zzz.com.ru/

Re:prolly not

[djdavetrouble]

thank you for hearing my off topic plea !

Re:prolly not

[jbtule]

The early functional prototype was an even more basic and generic looking browser, because we were evaluating the history feature and not the browser for our user evaluations in the original trailblazer project in the fall.

When the project was taken to MacWarriors, the organization had just had an infusing of freshman, who were just learning to object oriented programing and were learning Obj-C in this project. It was easier to try and teach them by implementing standard browser features rather than trying to integrate code. Also with starting from the functional prototype that was 2100 lines of code (which i re-factored much of it before giving them, though much of the original is still there) was a lot easier for them to figure out what was going on compared to hundreds of thousands of lines of Mozilla code.

It's useless to many because it's not a finished browser, but for those who want to experiment it's functional enough and improving. To be a proof of concept it is certainly functional enough. Implementation was only part of the project and that's really at it's begin not it's end, the interface didn't come out of thin air, it came from UI research doing analysis and evaluations on users before the first line of code was written.

Re:prolly not

[System.out.println()]

That said, are there any plans for integrating the History into an OSS browser? (Or are you hoping someone in the /. crowd will do so?) :) Or do you plan on adding more features to Trailblazer itself to make it a fully-featured browser?
Thanks for replying btw.

Re:prolly not

[jbtule]

We are hoping someone in the crowd adds it or something like it into an OSS browser. We are going to try make trailblazer into a fully featured browser just for experimentation, however we really don't want to necessarily continue this project year after year, and most likely by next year the group will be working on a new project for engineering open house.

Information Overload

[Yeep4711]

It's a nice tool, but what do you actually do with tons of browsing history? Most of the pages I visit have content that is changing frequently or content that I only need to check once. It's not very often that I need a particular page I visited days ago. And if that really happens Google is my friend.

Konq vs Gecko

[MagerValp]

Does Apple's webkit use the same konqueror base as Safari? Cause that browser sure feels a lot more like Gecko...

Re:Konq vs Gecko

[TheDredd]

Safari uses webkit which uses konqueror base

see also

[Anonymous Coward]

spidergraph (it plugs into Mozilla)

Innovation

[peterdaly]

The common way of working with a browser history function is manytimes a frusturating experience.

It's bad to the point of borderline broken. Hopefully there are no IP issues (in the property sense), and this may lead to improvements making usinging browser history less like pulling teeth.

-Pete

Re:Innovation

[System.out.println()]

IP issues? For caching a webpage?

Google's in trouble then.
If you are referring to other browsers copying this... the impression I got is that that's what this thing is for - "Here's a better history, look, it works, now work it into your browser."

Re:Innovation

[peterdaly]

No, problems in terms on idea ownership, Patents etc.

Good as an interface

[Underholdning]

This looks like a good idea for browsing your history. However, I usually find items of interst through two metods - I either search or I browse. This will help me in the latter. If this was combined with a free text search (maybe a client-side google) they'd have a heck of a tool.

Re:Good as an interface

[CountBrass]

Silly slashdotter - you didn't bother to actually check the facts did you?

It does include a free text search - it refines the web site thumbnails in the history map to just those that match.

Re:Good as an interface

[bangmonkey]

The video on their website shows them searching the history with the open source 'racine' (sp?) search engine, as well. That counts as a 'free text search', right? ;)

Re:Good as an interface

[jbtule]

'Lucene' from the Jakarta project: http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/

What won first place?

[no haters]

This seems very interesting and useful... yet it only won second place. What form of earth-shattering ingenuity won first place? I can't find it anywhere.

Re:What won first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

EOH@UIUC covers all engineering fields, not just computers. TrailBlaizer came in second to an impressive physical demo exhibit titled "Stopping Waves with Bubbles: The bubble plume breakwater".

Re:What won first place?

[operagost]

FWIW, the only original part of this idea is the thumbnails. IBM's WebExplorer for OS/2 in 1994 created a Webmap as you browsed. The killer part of this is being able to easily access pages you can't reach with the back button, because you already backtracked and then branched out in a different direction. However, they still win points for me by being the only ones to actually resurrect and improve this old idea.

Re:What won first place?

[no haters]

Neat, Thank you.

Re:What won first place?

[SEE]

Yep. The feature was then included in Mosaic 3.0, too.

Panels/sidebars are not a new thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh dear, another mindless MS drone... FYI, (side)panels are hardly MS's invention.

And I think Opera's implementation is unique. It gives you find as you type search in the history panel. Not like Internet Explorer at all.

Re:Panels/sidebars are not a new thing

[acebone]

yup - firefox has this too... really an industry standard, browsers that havent got this implemented yet shouldn't be used at all ... :)

Tracking the links they've visited in the past

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly what this browser makes far more manageable!

Browser Advances

[Justifiable_Delusion]

The internet browser really is something significant. It is our gateway to knowledge. Kinda like the TV screen was way back in the day. :-) What really amazes me when I see the future of the internet is the ability for it to truly deliver us information that we want when we want it. And it will be a thoughtless process as we get computers and software which can properly build a database of our past experiences and gives us choices and desires that we really want. Computing will be amazing. But, the browser is what rules now. Amazing interesting little innovations have made my browser experience that much better. The little drop down search menu's, tabbed browsing, the download manger and whatever else I missed from the land of Mozilla actually make me look forward to what they are going to do next to make my browsing experience richer and faster. I really am wondering what will be the next advance that makes my browsing that much better. What things do you people use that make your browsing better? I can't wait to play with this little toy when it or something similar is out for Win32. Long live new stuff that has a purpose. Innovation.

Who actually uses their browser history?

[j1mmy]

I can't remember the last time I used mine. Is this a solution in search of a problem or do people actually use their histories?

Re:Who actually uses their browser history?

[fozzmeister]

There are plenty of times that I want to find somewhere I was, however i usually resign myself to refinding (my dumb arse fault for not bookmarking it) rather than use history. This just shows how bad the current implementations are.

Re:Who actually uses their browser history?

[bay43270]

I can't remember the last time I used mine. Is this a solution in search of a problem or do people actually use their histories?

I think you just hit on the problem. I don't use my history either. Most of the time its easier to find a page you've been to by typing in what you remember into google. If our browsers were a better tool, maybe we wouldn't have to rely on google to find things that are already on our hard drive.

Most usability problems aren't obvious until they're fixed. Hopefully, trailblazer has found one.

Re:Who actually uses their browser history?

[Sabalon]

I try to from time to time. However, the history that comes with IE is such a pain to search through that I usually give up and head towards google.

Occasionally I'll be trying to find some page I was at two days ago. However, was it www.somesite.com or cgi.somesite.com, etc... Makes it a pain to find.

Re:Who actually uses their browser history?

[Butt]

But what if the page you found was result number 137 and you can't quite remember the search terms? Not as uncommon as you might think for researchers. It's easier to remember the context in which you were searching ("Three days ago I was looking for information on foo when I was home sick") rather than the actual terms.

I end up using history a fair bit, but more importantly, the potential is there for it to be used a lot more given a simpler implementation. (The argument is a bit like "how many people use their phone for text messaging anyway?" back in 1998 - obviously not nearly as many people as could given a viable implementation)

Very nice

[groomed]

It looks beautiful. So bloody obvious! Amazing nobody has figured this out before. I'm reminded of something a former boss of mine used to say: "It took 80 years after the invention of the printing press for someone to figure out page numbers are a good iea."

Really, I could probably come up with a whole range of criticisms, but why? This is a great idea. Practical, obvious, useful. The most negative thing I can say about this is probably that I feel sorry for the inventors. They'll probably be forgotten after Microsoft and the Mozilla foundation have released their own unspeakably crude and complexified implementations.

Re:Very nice

[CountBrass]

It's nice eye candy, I agree. But far too intrusive. I'm sure I'm not atypical in my web use habits. I have a dozen web sites I visit regularly- and they're book marked. Everything else I Google for. After all if I managed to find it before it must have been using Google...

The other problem is that it's very intrusive - and requires a lot of scrolling. Neither of those are good UI design characteristics for an auxillary browser tool to have.

Re:Very nice

[russellh]

It was figured out before. There were a lot of wacky interface ideas for the web in the early days. I had this specific idea in 1994 along with a few other people. There was a lot of interest in spiders then - if you think of the history as your small view of the structure of the web, why not have the browser walk forward also, adding those links to your overhead view? This turned out to be rather unmanageable as web pages in 1994 were often just huge lists of links. This page I'm looking at right now has - what? 75 links? Ugg.

The other strange one I remember from those days (less useful, I know) was the DOOM browser - a DOOM engine that would auto-generate an endless map from the hyperlink structure of the web. Special tags would fine tune it. (shades of VRML). Wouldn't you like to fight demons to get to the information you need? That's what it feels sometimes anyway...

Re:Very nice

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>Amazing nobody has figured this out before.

Hypercard featured an array of thumbnails as its history list.

Re:Very nice

[N3WBI3]

http://www.w3j.com/1/ayers.270/paper/270.html

Been there done that

and then patent it

[jtwJGuevara]

Hopefully Safari or /insert favorite web browser/ will do something similar in the future. And the organization who owns that browser will then patent the technology and own IP rights over it. It's an inevitability with the current business practices right now.

Re:and then patent it

[CountBrass]

Silly troll, you can't patent something that's prior art, or that's been made public. So there's two reasons why this couldn't be patented- even by the inventors.

Re:and then patent it

[presearch]

I think you can patent something after if you make it public,
but you have to file your application within one year.

Can somebody confirm that?

Re:and then patent it

[tuxedobob]

No, can you go on The Gamesome Mac and talk about your game?

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to listen to the (tq)radio.

Filter Google results using browser history

[jobbegea]

It would be nice if the results of Google could be filtered using your browser history.

This way you would have your own like WWW to search in and would only return sites you have visted in the past.

Re:Filter Google results using browser history

[easter1916]

That is a brilliant idea... BRILLIANT!!!

Re:Filter Google results using browser history

[azzy]

Er.. so a google search, but without using google's massive database of sites. Just searching your own history? Er.. then it isn't really much of a google search is it.

Re:Filter Google results using browser history

[jobbegea]

It is. Just restrict the results to sites you have visited in the (recent) past. You would use it to retrieve this single URL you forgot the bookmark but are unable to find in your history.

Using Google for the search is much better than just searching in you browser history because then you would only search in URLs and Titles, no page bodies.

It is a bit like using a multiple "site:" tag in your search string, except that the definition of this multiple "site:" tag is based on your browser history.

Re:Filter Google results using browser history

[azzy]

Surely you just need a client-side search engine, that does a more sophisticated search on your history, including content of those pages?

Re:Filter Google results using browser history

[bay43270]

It would be nice if the results of Google could be filtered using your browser history.

How is that different than what Trailblazer is doing? It allows a full text search of your history using lucene.

Re:Filter Google results using browser history

[jobbegea]

I am not sure how to implement it, maybe a plugin?
But however you implement it, you don't need either the content or the index of the pages you have visited because 'everything' already has been indexed by Google. Just search using Google and the 'plugin' will only present the hits that are from sites you have visited in the (recent) past (according to your browser history)

Google has an API and with that and access to your browser history you should be able to it.

The license could however be an issue and this is where MS could have the edge on searching as they can integrate it much tighter with IE. In that case substitute Google by MS Search in the text above.

Re:Filter Google results using browser history

[jfengel]

Google is more than just a huge database of sites. It's also a ranking scheme. Your history is often large enough that a simple keyword search would do only so much good.

Actually, I think that Trailblazer can also do a keyword search, which would do a lot of good. After all, the pagerank would be less important given that all of the web sites you've visited have at least some importance to you.

Unless, of course, you're using IE, in which case you've probably been sent to all sorts of web pages that you don't want to go.

Re:Filter Google results using browser history

[jobbegea]

There would be no index or content on your machine. Just URLs in your browser history.

K.I.S.S.: By using your browser history only as filter you would have up-to-date information (Google's massive index will take care of that) and wouldn't waste space with cached versions of web pages and the full text index.

I am sure this would work much better than any attempt at a graphical representation of your browser history.

Re:Filter Google results using browser history

[palad1]

isn't that the way it works for http://www.google.ru ? :)

Re:Filter Google results using browser history

[Anonymous Coward]

Why am I prompted for a UID/password for www.google.ru?

Re:Konq vs Gecko - Konq = Safari = webkit

[DrJay]

Webkit is the same data loading/display engine that powers safari. It's provided by Apple, works as far back as 10.2.6, and is part of the default 10.3 install. The XCode developer tools let you drag and drop webkits onto window prototypes - there's an article on doing so here:
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/ 01/23/w ebkit.html

So no, no Gecko.

JT

Re:Thanks University of Illinois

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, back in the day they brought us img src. So thanks indeed. Now to switch over to the google tab and search for more Katie Price images, safe search off of course.

Re:porn...

[Zog The Undeniable]

"Enjoyed"...now there's a new euphemism for it.

Re:Konq vs Gecko - Konq = Safari = webkit

[MagerValp]

Thanks, just curious.

this just made my day...

[phunhippy]

then i realised i'm stuck on windows at work...and i'll continue to forget sites i visit while "working"..

thanks!!!

but seriously... port it !!

Considering...

[Anonymous Coward]

the number of people here who think netscape invented the internet which microsoft stole, and have only a dim understanding of the contributions of Mosaic, you're absolutely right.

And with Andreeson trying to outsource every job making use of a computer to india, these kids might not even get a good chair out of the deal.

Re:porn...

[easter1916]

Like that hoary old chestnut about masturbating; "I was just relaxing..." "Oh, really? Were you relaxing with your right hand or your left?"

Perhaps it will find it's way to Mozilla?

[MrIrwin]

AFAIK Apple folk are gung ho on Safari these days, which is a Gecko base.

It would be nice if this technology could retrofit itself to Mozzilla/Firebird using XUL.

Re:Perhaps it will find it's way to Mozilla?

[Marcello_M]

I also hope so. It seemse the real advancement in browser UI since ages.

Re:Perhaps it will find it's way to Mozilla?

[jonathan_ingram]

which is a Gecko base

The underlying HTML technology beneath Safari is KHTML, not Gecko.

Re:Perhaps it will find it's way to Mozilla?

[MrIrwin]

"HTML technology beneath Safari is KHTML, not Gecko."

I stand corrected! Mind you, Konquerer has always struck me as being a bit slow and clunky, and yet Safari is reputed to be fast. Is it my immagination or is there some reason behind this?

Re:Perhaps it will find it's way to Mozilla?

[Ilgaz]

The KHTML lib, used on OSX isn't identical to KDE one. KDE one rather slowly gets patched by Apple changed code.

Another reason can be... Don't get me started about X and Quartz rendering difference ;)

Re:Perhaps it will find it's way to Mozilla?

[MrIrwin]

"Don't get me started about X and Quartz rendering difference ;)"

Unfortunatly I have never had the chance to even see, let alone get my hands on, OSX

Re:Perhaps it will find it's way to Mozilla?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think Safari's speed is due to Quartz (with or without OpenGL acceleration). In fact the added complexity should make it slower, if easier to code for. Safari seems to be fast at getting and rendering pages, independent of displaying them (it does really well opening pages in tabs behind the current one, for instance).

Also it's not really Safari, it's the underlying Webkit. Safari is just a shell with a few UI features (as is Trailblazer). And actually most of the UI is also drawn from frameworks that are part of the OS - Safari is a 2.8MB app bundle, and 2MB of that is images, (English only) interface definitions, and help. The Webkit alone is over 6MB.

It'd be interesting to see the Trailblazer history scheme included as an alternate view in Safari. But not a replacement, since I also like the current scheme, chronological separated by days - I keep it trimmed and basically use it as a chronologically ordered bookmark list (requires some editing of the Webkit and Safari preferences to prevent old history links from being aged out).

Re:Perhaps it will find it's way to Mozilla?

[Ilgaz]

Oh, sorry... I missed it.

There, specs for you, http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartz/

Its heavily accelerated stuff, everything you see on OSX screen.

Google is getting there...

[drewhearle]

I think a step in this direction has been taken with Google's Personalized Search (see the FAQ for details). You create a profile describing your interests (either in general, or what type of thing you're interested in at the moment, just for this search). You can then adjust via a slider how closely the search results should conform to this profile.

So if you wanted to search for an article on how to weave baskets (I know, weird example) that you had seen in the past, you could tell Google that you're interested in crafts and such but not shopping or historical research. Google would then filter out sites about the history of basket weaving and sites selling woven baskets. That doesn't leave a whole lot of room for anything but articles on how to weave baskets yourself.

I'm sure that'd get you there [almost] as fast as a Google search on your history. You'd probably come across even more relevant information than if you only searched your history. It's just another technique for Google to deliver the most relevant results in the search engine industry.

Re:Google is getting there...

[jobbegea]

Except that the concept of filtering a search result using your browser history is very simple. I would not need it all the time, only when I know I have been somewhere, but forgot the exact URL. Changing my personal search profile for this purpose is brute force and prone to miss anyway.

I would see this filtering as an advanced way of searching your history by using the huge index of Google.

I just want the page url/title sort by timestamp

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont see too much value in that 2D thing .. if yeah the tree format is "cool" or whatever and the thiumbnails are nice.

Fine I just want the page url/title with a thumbnail image sorted by timestamp (rather than a visual tree thing that could get complicated).

irider has tree-based history

[FrenZon]

I know it's not 'quite' the same, but for Windows, Irider, an internet-explorer rejib (like avantbrowser) has a tree-based history view in the left-hand pane. Sort of like a cross between what's seen in this story, and tabbed browsing.

It's pretty neat, but I actually like having a billion different windows open, so it wasn't for me.

What about Bookmarks?

[HHMMSS]

It seems a original idea, sure it's pretty ... but is good?
Please, We do urgently need original ideas in bookmarking.

Re:What about Bookmarks?

[LiquidCoooled]

Somebody just came up with a suggestion further up regarding this history thing, but I feel it would be better suited to Bookmarks.

The longer you spend on the page, the more vibrant the colours get - ie new pages start off black and white and progress to color.

I think windows already impliments a similar scheme of Hiding unused bookmarks, but once you have used it, it gets put into the list - this is impractical, cos all the bookmarks have been used at some point or other.

Also, setting up a few categories (not folders) for my links would help - allowing me to keep all my work stuff away from my code and away from the news sites etc. When I know im looking for news I can simply find them all.

These arent new ideas, but our absolutely right, the implimentation of current ones is lacking.

I tend to want to quickly bookmark what I'm reading at that moment, and to that end have page after page of links - usually all clustered together based on the subject I'm investigating.

You know - the simplest little tiny change that would help ME out would be for IExplorer to remember the last folder I saved a bookmark into (even if it was just session wide), so that I can continue dropping bookmarks in without concern about overfilling my main root branch.

Re:What about Bookmarks?

[An Onerous Coward]

I'd like to see Mozilla have an option for using a remote bookmarks file. It's a real pain keeping them all synchronized.

Even cooler, nested remote bookmarks. So if somebody keeps a really nicely organized set of links on Mesopotamian basket weaving, it could appear in your bookmarks under Education/History/Jimmy's Mesopotamian Basket Weaving. Somebody else could run a list of links of probable interest to Slashdot (Jargon file, Wikipedia, the RIAA, goatse, etc.)

The big trick would be to avoid recursion, which could probably be done by specifying a maximum depth, or disallowing any remote bookmark file but the top one from including remote bookmark files.

Me, I keep all my bookmarks under the "Toolbar Folder", so that they all appear in a neat little line under the location bar. I've got four favorites, and everything else is organized by categories. It works pretty well.

Proof that core libraries are key

[acomj]

I think this is a neat idea. I like the fact that they could build it fairly quickly using the solid core of OSX (Webkit) which renders HTML easily.

They didn't have to worry about writing an HTML parser, just built an app on top of it.

Its nice not having to get bogged down in the details. I think open source needs a more cohesive approach to things like this (QT is a close as it gets). Ironically the hTML renderer apple uses is open source, but I imagine not installed by default in linux (unless your using KDE)

Ironically the QT/GTK disputes make it more difficult to figure out which if any libraries to use.

This is what makes java such a threat to microsoft, whatever you think of the class libraries they are there for every java program to use.

But no history mechanism for students?

[Bazzargh]

This paper reviews history mechanisms in web browsers back in '97. One of the mechanisms mentioned, MosaicG is stunningly similar to the work in this article.

MosaicG was released in 1995.

It's interesting though that Tauscher's paper (the first link) conlcuded back then that the 'stack based' histories we used were not optimal, mainly because sibling history branches disappear. She found that the best method tested was to have a 'context sensitive web subset', ie a graph showing the relationships between visited nodes in relation to the current node, rather than a strict history.

TouchGraph Google Browser

[ajutla]

Here's something sort of similar; it's an interesting way of looking at search results from Google "visually." Kind of a similar concept to the history idea, I suppose. It's a java applet that basically shows your search results in a clustered "map," showing related web sites linked together. It's sort of gimmicky but is actually quite interesting to play around with. At first I was skeptical but it's quite usable. Maybe Apple's history idea might turn out to be pretty cool.

A modest suggestion

[dborod]

It would be really cool if TrailBlazer we able to integrate with Safari rather than act as a stand alone browser. If TrailBlazer was able to follow your trail by parsing Safari's cache it would be totally awesome. As it is now, TrailBlazer is a cool novelty, but as a browser it lacks many of the features most modern web users use.

Re:A modest suggestion

[iamacat]

It's not very difficult to duplicate Safari using Apple's WebKit framework. Then, add the TrailBlazer history and release the sources so that the next person along doesn't have to duplicate the work.

Re:A modest suggestion

[tofferr]

I graduated from the U of I... I'm sure the author's are presenting this as a proof of concept. The ultimate goal, of course, is the integrate it with a mainstream browser. The interesting thing to me is that they picked Apple and Webkit to do the prototyping.

How about using bookmarks?

[cascadingstylesheet]

I've been thinking about this for weeks ...

I realize that I still reflexively bookmark good sites, even though I almost never use the bookmarks (beyond the few I put on the Links/Personal toolbar). I just go to Google for everything.

Yet I'd like to harness the value of that information. I wish I could do a google search, limited to the bookmarked hosts. Weighted by how many bookmarks I have for that host. So if I have 30 bookmarks at 4guysfromrolla or whatever those results come to the top.

Should be possible by running a daily script on my bookmarks.html, to build a searching script. Do individual site searches for each host, ordered by the number of times the hosts occur in the bookmarks, then merge the results. Just haven't got around to it...

Re:How about using bookmarks?

[sklib]

In order for bookmarks to truly be reflexive, all sites you have bookmarked should have you bookmarked as well. Maybe in SOVIET RUSSIA?

Probably a good idea

[ajs318]

Not being a Mac user, I have a middle button {that isn't meant to be a flame, although it does sound like one ..... but bear with me and you'll see} which lets me follow links in a new tab. So I can keep a bit of a chain of thought together ..... if I know something is relevant to the page I'm reading, I can call it up and not lose the current page.

Typically, I'll do a search, then open one result at a time in a new tab; if the article is useful I'll keep its tab open, if it's no good I'll close it. However, it all gets very unwieldy once you have more than about half a dozen tabs on the go at once. Plus, tabs are {TTBOMK} not rearrangeable -- so the structure breaks a bit, because I can't put the tabs I opened from each first-level click next to one another. Tabs are good, maybe even great, but they aren't perfect.

Other times, I will bookmark a site which, on further exploration, turns out not to be any good. Which is a waste of a bookmark.

The computer already knows what sites I have visited, how long I spent looking at each one, whether or not I did any word searches {and what they turned up}, and what I clicked to next -- whether it was a link from that page, or if I returned to a previous tab, or started a new search. Now, if I want to find a page that I know I visited recently, how should the above-mentioned information be presented to me so that I can find the page I'm looking for, quickly?

It's good to see that question being addressed. This could be something the web has been waiting for.

Re:Probably a good idea

[dthree]

I do the same thing on my Mac when I read sites like boingboing or plastic, but not usually with search results. Safari's snapback is a convenient way to return to a search results page with 1 click no matter how far you've travelled into a linked site.

I have been in the situation where I knew I visited a site recently, but couldn't find it in the history for one reason or another. Current history schemes of pure chronological and domain-sorting don't really help if all you can remember is that "I found the link in a blog somewhere", but providing the history as a tree structure of links clicked would be a big step in the right direction.

Re:Probably a good idea

[InfiniteVoid]

Not that I'm an advocate of the single-button mouse, but when I'm using my PowerBook and don't have an external mouse plugged in it's not difficult at all to use tabbed browsing in Safari or Mozilla. (You just Command-Click.)

In fact, I think I prefer Safari's tabs to Mozilla's. Safari's are smaller, more minimalist, and leave more room for actual web page.

Re:Probably a good idea

[Rick Zeman]

Not being a Mac user, I have a middle button {that isn't meant to be a flame, although it does sound like one ..... but bear with me and you'll see} which lets me follow links in a new tab.

Being a Mac user, I have one. ;-) I know this wasn't a flame, but just because a Mac doesn't come with a multi-button mouse doesn't mean it can't use one.
Mine's set to F9 (Expose's minimize).

Someone else asked about the name of the Apple history viewer. Didn't it use QuickTime 3d and may have been called Project X? I seem to have some memory associating that technology with Ayn Rand....

Re:Probably a good idea

[The One and Only]

Being a Mac user with a 2 button plus scroll wheel mouse, I do the exact same thing.

Re:Probably a good idea

[ajs318]

OK, OK, I know ..... I wasn't having a go at Mac mice being single-button. You've got the Windows mob to do that! Rather, my point was that I find the tabbed browsing in Konqueror and Mozilla useful but not perfect, because it's a flat structure. Having many windows with many tabs open in each one isn't perfect either -- now it's a two-dimensional structure, alright, but in the form of a matrix as opposed to a tree.

Or am I just setting my sights too high -- expecting a really good user interface to compensate for a broken user?

Re:Probably a good idea

[Pope]

Project X aka Hot Sauce.
http://www.eclectica-systems.co.uk/complex /hotsauc e.php

Re:Probably a good idea

[geekboy2k]

FYI - If you are using Firefox you can download tabbrowser extensions that allow you to reorder your tabs. The extension site seems to be broken right now, but here is the link...

http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/

Scroll down and look for "Tabbrowser extensions"

Re:Probably a good idea

[Mathi�u]

Actually, on my powerbook, I like the single button concept. You can still access right click using Ctrl-click which is as natural as a second button (at least on a laptop): the left hand stays next to the Ctrl-Option-Command keys while the right hand goes to the touchpad.

As for the middle scroll button, I use Fn-slide: I press the key, and move up or down on the touchpad. This is much better than my old Microsoft Intellimouse where the scroll can't roll up anymore.

I don't know how difficult that feels on a desktop computer, but one button with Mac OS X feels good on my laptop: try it!

And as a side note, I love to have a Compose key (-e e produces e). There is no way to access international characters on a standard qwerty keyboard with Windows: that's a shame!

Re:Probably a good idea

[ajs318]

There is no way to access international characters on a standard qwerty keyboard with Windows: that's a shame!

Well, seeing as I'm not a Windows user either, I could say that was SFEP. But I thought Windows users could access non-keyboard characters by holding down ALT (and Fn on a laptop) and typing its ASCII code on the numeric pad, unless that feature has been removed since Windows 98 (the last Windows version I used). Nah, you're right -- we're on the same side -- it is SFEP!

What safari isn't meant to be

[adzoox]

The more code that is added to Safari the more unstable and slower it can get.

This sounds like a great feature, but like tabs (which is very helpful) - few people will use it to it's potential.

I think Apple needs to concentrate on being faster and more stable - I really even wish they would remove some features from Safari - when explaining ANY browser nowadays to my LEAP program classes (who are mostly elderly) - it is difficult, at best, to explain ALL the features - something you HAVE to do so they won't be confused and know where to go to set preferences, etc...

I also would like Apple to remember thet their core is only as good as the bushel - meaning - I would like Apple to realize that Opera, iCab, and Ominiweb give Apple the appearance of broader support - therefore, these should be features for those browsers to integrate - features people should want to pay for if they use them.

Re:What safari isn't meant to be

[Mathi�u]

Agreed, but I'd love to see that as a plugin! My safari has the one plugin that I couldn't live without: PithHelmet. This alone reduces greatly my interest in Omniweb for instance, which is good but doesn't block ads as good as PithHelmet default rules (and best of all, PithHelmet hides the ads).

Safari is clean, and it feels great like that. But plugins are a must: look at FireFox - good because there's a lot of available plugins.

Can you say "bloated and cumbersome"?

[Walkiry]

I knew you could. Browsing History has to be one of the most useless features in a browser. The only thing they're good for is to remind you of links you've already visited (you know, just in case you have fish memory and can't remember if you clicked something a few minutes/hours ago), and for auto-complete of URLs. And the first one is not even that useful since nowadays, with the advent of DSL and cable, clicking a link doesn't involve almost a minute of loading bad HTML like with a 28.8 Kbps modem.

I don't think I've clicked that "history" button in months. Of course, it could be my fish memory too :D

Re:Can you say "bloated and cumbersome"?

[zephc]

Nonsense. I have my browser history (in Safari) go back 5 or 6 days, so there are sometimes interesting links I want to revisit, but didn't add to my bookmarks.

Re:Can you say "bloated and cumbersome"?

[Walkiry]

So do I, but all I have to do is type part of the url and the autocomplete takes care of the rest. Yes, autocomplete is great. No, it doesn't need a hierarchical, date-classified, thumbnail-enhanced history tool.

If it's not a single website (say, a CNN article for example, where you have to put a bunch of nonsense after the .php or .asp or whatever) it's easier to go to google and punch in the appropiate keywords than to dig through a whole bunch of pages in that history, that won't look very descriptive in either their link form or their "thumbnail" form (funny that, most news outlets have a consistent formatting that looks strikingly similar if you just squash it to a thumbnail).

So really, history is next to useless. An overbloated history like the one shown above, while no doubt an interesting exercise, is even less useful.

Re:Can you say "bloated and cumbersome"?

[SEE]

Of course browsing history is useless; it's horribly implemented. If you'd ever used IBM Web Explorer for OS/2, or Mosaic 3.0, however, you'd know what it could and should be.

Memory..

[artlu]

Seems awesome, i am even more proud that they did this on OSX first. Although, development with Xcode is extremely easy.
Anyway, how are they going to deal with people that visit thousands of webpages a day/week. Is their history going to catalog all of those images and take screenshots of each one? It seems like there would be some huge memory/efficiency requirements and would make the browser more unstable as you visit more website.
Apple's own safari has a similar problem with web icons even, let alone whole thumbnail images!

Although, it would make searching through all my previous porn a lot more fun ;).

does anyone remember Apple's previous technology..

[mattkime]

it dates to the days of OpenDoc and CyberDog. It was a visual display of a hierarchy. i believe they showed it being used to display the flow of a website. i think it started with an "x".

any ideas?

We need a tree for browser history.

[scorp1us]

<ECODE>
I never understood why this hasn't been done before. But a lot of times you go backone or more pages, go to another page, then all your previous stuff is lost.

We need a way to say, from this page you want to these places.. Currently we are limited to:

S--->--->--->--->--->
But we need:
S--->--->--->--->---> +--->
+--->--->---> +--->
+--->--->---->--->--->
Where the '+' are junctions where two mor more links were followed
</ECODE>

Re:We need a tree for browser history.

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM did exactly that in the browser that came with os/2

Re:We need a tree for browser history.

[SEE]

It has been done before. IBM Web Explorer for OS/2 and Mosaic 3.0 both had tree browser histories.

Fad

[koniosis]

this is a great idea, but I could see it being a fad, turn it on for a week then get pissed off with the performance/lack of links on the same page, I find my history works great in Opera, and with the speed of the internet now its just as easy to click a link in ur side bar and have it load up in the browser window, think, thats not it, and try another. Honestly, I never really spend much time sifting through my history, If you know what you're looking for, you don't need thumbnails. But I could see where it'd be useful (just not very often). This seems like it could be an AOL thing, less experience computer users would Love this.

The layout is the same as...

[Anonymous Coward]

The layout of the webicons is the same as the message-icons in the visual thread display of usenet threads in MacSOUP which has been reused in many other usenet discussion groups clients.

Still its a very bright idea to realise that the tree layout of message dates, can also be used for webpage visit dates when you add thumbnails as a visual reminder.

As on usenet you can kill uninteresting branches (maybe not yet implemented). As we see so many references to porn an example:
You have been web browsing for serious research, then you got bored and visited a porn portal and visited many porn pages, then comes the coffee-break and after that you resume your research. Now you can remove the porn history with one click because the porn pages all branch off of one page or time-slot.

Dennis SCP

My hat's off

[cyclobotomy]

Now I feel bad that I didn't implement this back when I thought of it four years ago. It's a pretty simple idea, and I'm surprised noone else claims to have thought of it before as well: browser history is a graph, it should berepresented as such! With the number of new browsers out there, and not even a hint of something like this (Safari's snapback feature is the closest thing I can think of), I have to wonder... Oh well, my hat is off to the folks that actually implemented this, and quite beautiflly to boot!

put it in a menu

[cyclobotomy]

I think that something like this would be more accessable in a simple menu showing a tree form of the graph:
Branches in the tree would be submenus. If there was more than one branch, place a "->" as the first item in the submenu, leading to a submenu for the next branch.

Re:How will this help people with shared computers

[Anonymous Coward]

Just install a second browser and use that.

Show's off Apple strategy to leverage open source

[csoto]

It's obvious they used the Safari render engine. Very cool idea.

Wait!! Trailblazer isn't REAL!

[The Spoonman]

It can't possibly be! If it were real, it would indicate innovation in the browser arena, and that's just not POSSIBLE! According to all the pundits, Microsoft killed all browser innovation when they "killed off" Netscape. How could this be possible?

For those too stupid to notice, the above was sarcasm.

Re:Wait!! Trailblazer isn't REAL!

[rjung2k]

Why do you think this innovation is happening in the Apple userspace?

WARNING: THIS POST HAS NO REPLIES

[digitaleus]

this space was intentionally left blank

Pad++

[ChristTrekker]

Is it anything like Pad++? These ideas aren't exactly new.

Re:Pad++

[immyz]

Is it anything like Pad++? These ideas aren't exactly new.

Pad++, MosaicG, and others were evaluated to an extent. The focus wasn't to make previous incarnations work in Mac OS X, but to create a solution.

It's most similar to MosaicG. There's a difference between the early '90's and 2004, though. Disk storage has increased immensely. As a result, we were able to make and store the thumbnails with much more useful quality. Also, searching is helpful.

Surprising to many, after real use, one of the biggest features of TrailBlazer is being notified that you've visited a webpage before. This can lead to the user deciding to jump right to the history and finding the destination page right away without trying to make their way clicking through links.

Further information (PDFs) on the early ideas and reasoning are available at our TrailBlazer papers page.

- Josh (TB co-designer-developer)

Re:Pad++

[ChristTrekker]

I came across Pad++ while doing research for a paper on web usability. I would have liked to have known about TrailBlazer back then. I might try downloading the dmg this weekend.

Athena?

[Quixote]

Am I the only one who remembers this browser from ... 1995? 1996? called "Athena" (or something like that) which had a graphical history window like this one? It was from a University in Florida, I believe.. too many beers between then and now, memory's fuzzy.. :(

Looks cool

[mvonballmo]

I think the graphical browsing is very nice ... but what happens when you can't remember where in the 1 meter x 1 meter space you should be looking?

You still need a find-as-you-type thing like Opera has, just to narrow down your selection. When you type, it could zoom out and highlight the 'found' pages, a la Expose. Then you can click on them to see if that's the thing you want.

I think it really needs an Expose-like view that shows the whole graph at once (within reason) and lets you display a set that matches a query.

Re:Looks cool

[Anonymous Coward]

It has a built-in 'narrow down' find feature, based on the OS one, where matching pages are shown as you type. See the video.

All in all, this is a nice demo of the underlying Mac OS X tech - it most likely has spell checking, speech, PDF output, printing and all the other stuff that you get for free when developing an OS X app. It's probably more work to turn those features off than include them ; )

I'd bet the thumbnails and the webcore/webkit are the built-in ones, too.

J

Trailblazer ...

[Draoi]

.. was also the Apple internal codename for the PowerMac 5200. One of the first products I worked on at Apple ... *sigh*

Re:Trailblazer ...

[jbtule]

Back when I was in middle school I really wanted PowerMac 5200, and my parents bought me one, however due to supply problems apple offered me a 6214 with monitor and a whole 1 gig of hard drive space instead of 800 megs for the same price.

Only 2D?

[Ryosen]

Two-dimensions are all well and good, but, c'mon, this is the 21st century. If I can't have my "Minority Report"-style glove-and-goggle mix, at least I can browse in 3D! This actually came out a couple of years ago. Fun to play around with.

Re:Only 2D?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to look forward to Minority Report. What about that kick-ass 3-D computer system Michael Douglas used in Disclosure?

Re:Only 2D?

[MichaelGCD]

d00d, just buy a gibson

Browser Advancements.

[Justifiable_Delusion]

What other advancements in browser tech have you seen to change your perspective on your internet gateway?

I personally am a big fan of the recent firefox drop down search bars. And of course tabbed browsing is really nice...not really sure who first implemented it.

Anyone have an idea as to what will be the next big bwoser innovation? Will it be sound controlled browsers that work well and fast for the masses?

Thumbnail Cache Size??

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, now my Internet History will be LARGER than my Internet Cache. LOL. In solving the problem they decided to keep track of every web page you visit and take a picture of it. Not a good solution - IMHO.

Just want history of HTTP POSTed pages

[SnappingTurtle]

I have an unfortunate habit of previewing -- but not posting -- comments on /. and UserFriendly. Then I realize I never actually posted the comment that I previewed, and it's gone, because my browser doesn't keep a history of web pages that are the result of an HTTP POST.

It would be cool if I could retrieve the results of the POST so that I wouldn't have to either rewrite my sage words or decide to not bother (which is probably the better choice).

dang, good thing i clear out my cache!

[xMac]

and here i thought i was being paranoid for clearing my cache and history for the evidence of pr0n surfing...

i guess i'm not alone. nor paranoid. nor the only one surfing for pr0n.

PHP mini page generator

[dreadlock9]

Someone should develop a mini-browswer written in PHP that downloads and displays those mini icons of each page. Then the average web programmer can add those types of functions to their sites.

In this particular application, I don't think you can directly get the history list from your browswer, but maybe if you use frames you can go to a start page that uses frames to browse and another frame to display the mini-icon history. Then you'd have a similar application that would work in most broswers :)

Re:does anyone remember Apple's previous technolog

[saddino]

You're thinking of ProjectX, which was renamed HotSauce. If I remember correctly, it was a "fly through" of spheres in fake 2D, each sphere representing a site (and surrounded by smaller spheres representing linked sites). As you approached a satellite sphere, you would begin to see its links come into view....and so on, ad infinitum.

Here's one link I found in Google "apple hotsauce browser."

Just like sequence diagrams...

[paithuk]

this winds up being too large to show any useful information in a reasonable area (i.e. the size of a screen). I would have thought that expose would be a better solution to this problem...

School Projects

[superpulpsicle]

Umm.... doesn't the university own any projects you innovate on school grounds now? Wasn't there a law passed during the tech boom to allow school to PWN you and your ideas while you are a student.

SUP MACWARRIORS! Congrats on the Slashdotting.

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this... the 2nd Slashdotting for Macwarriors, 3dosx, now Trailblazer.

And SigMil's (more like Nasko and Mike's) reverse engineering project/paper/book.

Who else has been Slashdotted?

In any case, we've got metric boatloads of bandwidth, everyone will get a quick response from our lil' Ultra 2 webserver.

-- John S.

I was asleep for most of EOH, though and I couldn't see most of the projects. I regret that...

What a great way to study ADD

[LqqkOut]

A flat page history is one thing, but this is a great, unobtrusive way to chart people's attention patterns!

With all of the privacy baggage aside, imagine providing a browser history to your counselor to see how effective a particular treatment might be.

Just add mouseover magnification

[Derek Mason]

This is a great idea - the only problem I can see with it is that the browser history map becomes too unwieldly, requiring a lot of horizontal and vertical scrolling. The missing element is mouseover magnification like the OS X Dock has - that would let the user see their entire history (OK, let's be realistic - one week at a time) in the window, and then home in on the relevant part by moving the mouse. Kudos guys!

Re:Just add mouseover magnification

[manmanic]

Brilliant idea. I suspect that mouseover magnification would be all over today's GUIs, if they hadn't been designed in a time when it wasn't computationally possible. Apple's Expose is a kind of OS-level implementation, but only for finding lost windows - not for general use.

Re:does anyone remember Apple's previous technolog

[Anonymous Coward]

The project was originally called Project X, then later renamed HotSauce.

More further info & screen shots, go here:
http://mappa.mundi.net/maps/maps_018/

Tabbing improvements

[swb]

I'd like to see tabs that were movable: within the current browser window, to another browser window or into its own broswer window.

Like you, I often keep a browser window for a specific "topics" and have various aspects of that topic in different tabs. Sometimes I get "lost" and open something in the wrong browser window, but can't reorganize it.

an easier way

[Dstreelm]

Personally, I love this idea, but i think they could make a simple change that would allow for more information to be displayed on screen and without having alot of the same looking thumbnail on screen. I used the browser for about 10 minutes on different areas of the same website and all the thumbnails looked the same. The solution is simple; only thumbnail the first page of a website you visit, then list underneath the thumbnail, all of the pages that youve visited in the same website. If you happen to click on a link on one of the pages which takes you to another website, that will be displayed as a thumbnail and an arrow to the next website. I realize that that is a little complicated, but it will allpw for more information on screen, take up less memory, and be alot easier to use.

Sweet

[JZlives]

Now I finally have a simple and quick way to check if my room mate is using my computer for porn. I often come home to find my browser history is cleared for some strange reason...

Re:How will this help people with shared computers

[Eccles]

All those people who flush their cache+history once per day to erase their porn hunting tracks won't be able to use this.

Perhaps it could allow branch deletion, so you can just hide parts of your history?

Alternatively it could have a filter, but then someone might see your filter and discover you have womenwithfarmanimals.com there, which is just as revealing.

Thumbnails -> Colours -> I Win!

[Vagary]

I don't know if this is a personal quirk of mine or if other people share similar cognitive function, but I remember colours better than anything else. No matter what else I remember about a webpage, I always remember its background colour. Therefore the thumbnails would be invaluable to me when I'm trying to find that page I saw with a white background and a big pic that was pinkish-white (Caucasian skintone) with a red dot in the middle.

Great just Great

[Anonymous Coward]

So now if I forget to clear my browser history every day, not only does my wife see www.spankmehard.com in my history - she sees thumbnails of the spankees.

Fight against this one boys. Someday you will be old and married also.

Re:Great just Great

[valkraider]

All fine and dandy until you find your wife is a spankee...

Google to rule them all

[Sabalon]

Why do I have a feeling that if I were to try this, I'd have google on the left followed by a bunch of lines leading out of it to all the other pages?

Quite slow.

[Jeremy Erwin]

Almost every action I take is preceded by one of those spinning wheels.

web map

[John.Thompson]

This sounds very much like the "web map" feature of IBM's "Web Explorer" browser for OS/2 back in the early 90's. Web Map created an html page comprised of the links you had visited in that session, arranged in a heirarchical manner. I've not seen anything quite like it in other browsers.

Sounds Famillier

[TheOldBear]

I'm at work at the moment, so I don't have a mac for testing, but this sounds similar to the graphical session history from IBM's Web Explorer [developed about the same time as Mosaic]

Mozilla Plugin

[hjf]

Cool. Now we need a mozilla plugin to do just that. Any volunteers?

Mighte Be Nice for Visually Oriented Sites

[jubei]

This might work well for people that mostly visit visually oriented sites, but not for me. I don't remember pages by a layout or logo, but instead because of some text content, or information that I want.

What would be more useful for me would be a short summary of the web pages. Perhaps the browser could be smart enough to follow "About" links and report the first paragraph of actual information.

Also being able to search through keywords of pages in your cache would be useful (Selectable from title-search and content-search).

This is Excellent!

[CedgeS]

I have frequently wished that the history in a browser was a tree, so I could go back and then forwards along a different branch. The summary doesn't mention it, but the arangement of the pages in the space is a tree built by your browsing.

Now where's the copycat mozilla plugin...?

Merge bookmarks and history

[TuringTest]

The next step in this trend is merging bookmarks and history in a single interface. I've never seen the point in having separate panels for bookmarks and history when they are clearly related to the same task: bringing back pages that I know I've already visited.

A hierarchical (and usually enormous) tree of bookmarks is a broken, broken, broken concept. I spend more time searching a bookmark I know I have, that looking for it in Google. That means something: Google is a better tool than bookmarks.

What I'd like to have is a powerful, a-la-Google context search of my history: I don't want to save "bookmarks", I want to drag predefined "keywords" onto TrailBlazer's history thumbnails; so that when I later select a keyword, all pages that I've marked are retrieved in their full browsing context.

Re:Merge bookmarks and history

[brusk]

Sounds like a good idea but isn't. There are lots of times I have a site bookmarked that I *KNOW* I will need again, but only irregularly. Perfect example: a site with information useful for preparing my income tax. It won't be sitting in my history because I only go there once a year (right about now, better get cracking on that...), but if I google it I'd just end up having to pick through dozens, even thousands, of similar sites to find the one I need. As it is, I have a Business -> Taxes section in my bookmarks, and the bookmark sits there waiting to be used every April. Exactly as it should be.

Re:Merge bookmarks and history

[n8johnson]

"Non-GPL soft[ware] lets anyone make a non-free version dominant by adding significantly important features in non-free code. "

This comment seems of topic, but I want to respond to it. I am a supporter of public domain software development, exactly because of this phenomenon, not in spite of it. The non-free (proprietary, copyrighted) developers must expend enormous resources to hire the thinkers, developers and marketers that invent, code, test, and try out these new features in the marketplace. They often fail.

When new and valuable features do come from the traditional software development model, free software developers are free to re-code the features and even improve on them, merging their changes with the public code base.

This is not all conjecture. Non-free versions of the Zope web application server (BSD licensed, so nearly public domain) exist, and developers contribute to the free code base.

For a more detailed example, please this letter on my website: http://betterdifferent.com/software/zwikilicense/

And here for a letter to the Open Source Initiative: http://betterdifferent.com/software/osi

-nate
betterdifferent.com

ps I want to save a detailed history of my Google searches, the resulting links and the ones I visited (the actual content, not just a link!) so 50 years from now my children can research what it was like to live in 2004, and can better understand their father.

fancy but...

[timts]

I am happy with the blogger button from google tool bar, where I just click it, log the website I want with information I input(usually nothing).

That's odd

[multipartmixed]

I didn't really there could be another group (outside of Redmond, WA) which would actually invest significant effort into making better browsers history.

WARNING: PARENT POST IS A FILTHY LIE! LIES!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

*BSD is dying

Not if you like your tabs!

[CedgeS]

I just tried out spidergraph from the install links on their website, as the parent suggested. Here's my experience. (Mozilla 1.4, Windows 2000).

1. Install went fine, restarted mozilla
2. First thing I noticed was it disables tabbed browsing - that's no good!
3. I tried clicking the big spidergraph button. It brought up a nifty little graph with two nodes. It wasn't a graph of websites I visited, and I could never get it to change.
4. Tried uninstalling it. It doesn't show up in preferences, and I couldn't find an uninstall feature anywhere, so I extracted it from chrome directory by hand.
5. After manual uninstall of spidergraph, the menu item View->Show/Hide->Tab Bar was still disabled, but right click would get me open in new tab. Good enough, but annoying.
6. Decided it wasn't good enough. Uninstalled mozilla 1.4 and installed 1.6. And behold, it's still that way. I almost never use Windows except for work and a few games, so I can live with it.

Is this something the technology finally supports?

[finelinebob]

It'll be interesting to see how many copycats appear over the next few weeks.

Sure, as other people have noted above, there may have been other efforts similar to Trailblazer out there as early as 1995, but computer power has increased considerably since then. CPUs are faster. We have more and faster RAM. Hard drives (for caching) are faster and larger. Display instructions are getting dumped off to graphics card processors, leaving CPUs to handle other tasks. Tighter integration with the core OS may, one of these days, also make browsers faster ... tho comparing WinIE or Safari against Gecko shows this point comes up short right now.

The one thing that might make something like Trailblazer usable is the scrollwheel. I've heard the complaints about how "people don't scroll" and that may have been true in 1995, even 2001, but I'd wager that scrollwheels have changed that considerably. If I had to constantly move my cursor from links in the body of a web page to the window's scrollbar and back, I wouldn't scroll either. But being able to scroll vertically and horizontally without having to move my mouse a millimeter changes scrolling from a bug to a feature.

I agree with others here that history lists aren't used in general because no one has come up with a good way to access this information. Personally, I use the History menu in Safari far more often than the Bookmarks menu -- largely because I don't want to spend the time searching through hundreds of bookmarks for something I accessed four hours ago, nor do I want to spend the time figuring out how to organize those hundreds of bookmarks.

As a mac user, Trailblazer and Expose seem like a killer combination. With Expose, having separate windows open instead of tabbing those windows works better for me. Having one of those browser windows being a graphical representation of my history list would be killer.

2nd place!

[rfernand79]

This comes to show that First Prize winners don't necessarily make it to slashdot.

Tilt-wheel mice

[System.out.println()]

Does anyone know if the tilt function of these mice is supported by OS X? I'd consider getting one at $19.99, although I would have to sacrifice my beloved side buttons... unless they also make a 5-button tilt wheel mouse? *drool*

Re:Tilt-wheel mice

[System.out.println()]

Scratch that, found it. linky

The good, the bad...

[ecloud]

This is basically a good idea. Searching your history is particularly innovative; but it would require some memory (keep a searchable index of which words could be found on which pages in the entire history, or else leverage google to do the same work, which would be slower...) Also their use of screen real estate in this implementation is rather excessive. The OS/2 browser (I forget the name) from IBM did a much better job of showing history as a tree rather than a list (this page was accessed via link from that one, etc.) but more compactly. (Also without thumbnails, which are another good idea.)

Ideally it should offer both a simple chronological view and a threaded view, like some email programs do (mutt for example).

And, it should be integrated into a generic journal which logs everything you do, not just browsing; and provides blogging features (not only did I visit this page, but here are my thoughts about it, and do I want to publish those thoughts or just keep them to myself for searching later).

It's cute, but...

[blair1q]

I occasionally visit on the order of one to two thousand pages per day. (Not all unique, but in a history list uniqueness shouldn't be enforced.)

This thing they've come up with isn't nearly powerful enough a compression of the information for me.

anyone remembers TOIP?

[Knights who say 'INT]

Wonsoponatime, during the early days of the browser wars, there was a "third contestant" (it never was popular enough to be in third, or tenth place, for that matter) called The Other Internet Package, from The Other Company.

I remember having found about it from cnet's browsers.com, and used it for what, a year and a half.

It would organize the site you're browsing in a hierarchical list of hyperlinks on the left as you went through it. It was an amazing concept, specially for, um, I think it was 1996.

Eventually, Windows/my HD/whatever really got fucked, I had to reformat, and could never find again The Other Internet Package. Their website domain, www.theother.com, had been sold to one of those link farms.

When Konqueror acts stupid with me, I still mourn the passing of The Other Internet Package. Just imagine what it could have been, by now. Of all the saddest words of pen and tongue, the saddest are these: it could have been.

Somebody did figure it out before...

[Esekla]

So bloody obvious! Amazing nobody has figured this out before.

FYI - this feature (more or less) was on IBM's initial web browser for OS/2, before they ported Netscape. I remember using it almost a decade ago. I think they called it a "Web Map" and it was just a tree representation of the pages you had opened. Very simple, intuitive and useful.

Re:Somebody did figure it out before...

[schotter]

Actually I think Extensis (maybe?) actually had an implementation of a visual browser history, as an add-on to Netscape in the classic Mac OS.

This was forever ago however.

Been done .. learn from history...

[Atomic Frog]

It's a great idea, except it's already been done.
IBM's Webexplorer (circa 1995 and earlier) had already implemented the same functionality (minus the web page screenshots).

It was called "Web Map" ...
It looks _exactly_ the same.

Should be easy enough to implement as a proxy

[argent]

Set up a proxy that listens at (say) 81, and stashes the page and referrer info a a cache. Then have a special magic site (say, original.site.history) that the proxy serves itself and provides a tree view.

Should be easy enough to bash together as a Perl script, then it'd work in any browser. Then, a hotlink like:

javascript:p=location.hostname;void('http://'+p+ '. history/','history');

And bobs your uncle!

that thing is dying for better navigability

[scrytch]

I watched the three minute video and saw lots of aiming at the vertical and horizontal scrollbars so they could scrub the window over these BIG thumbnails, or follow the history arrows as they fly WAY off the screen, and thought "i'd rather just use text". Now if you could zoom out, collapse and expand the tree, show a text list to the side and thumbnails to another side, then there'd be something. As it is, it looks like more aiming with the mouse than even the average mac user would care for.

Re:Thanks University of Illinois

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn right. Our school rocks. :P

I find it incredibly funny

[Anonymous Coward]

How quickly things are modded "flamebait" in apple.slashdot.org when the poster dares not drool over the latest gizmo with an apple logo slapped on top. Heh.

OmiWeb's History/Bookmark's Structure superior

[tyrione]

Clean, efficient and with their new tabs implementation, exactly all that is needed, at the moment.

Maybe they'll extend it to allow a tab parsed thumbnail view of any select history directory via sheets or something to that effect.

Any one get this to compile for them?

[darkstream]

I tried compiling the code to test it out using Xcode. Gave an error during compilation - couldn't find "Cocoa/Cocoa.h". I don't have this file. Anybody know where to get it? I never understood why people distribute code, but not compiled binaries. They used to do this on the Amiga and now they do it in OSX. Allowing people to compile their own code makes sense for those running *nix under different configurations, but Amigas and Macs tend to be standardized. Why not make a binary available of Trailblazer? Not everybody knows how to compile software. I just like to use it. I'm not lazy. I'm busy! LOL

What a non-innovation

[DulcetTone]

A browsing session is so obviously a directed graph of pages and transitions between them. This counts as an innovation?!?

Nice for a student project, not new idea

[weiweb]

Looks cool. It takes some manual labor to construct the project. But the idea is not that innovative. You can check out something similar that has been in existence for more than 8 years: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/internet/MosaicG/Mosa icG_1.0_about.html (The WWW Graphic History Browser)

Re:Nice for a student project, not new idea

[jbtule]

Only when you look at it in the surface does TrailBlazer seem the same as MosaicG. It's just similar in a few regards, specifically visual aspects. Our interface came from figuring out what users remember about the pages they visited, how they get back to them, and how to make this easier for the user.

• Users usually remember the general path in which they took to get to a page, so showing the hierarchy allows them to find these paths and get to their destination with out re-traversing every page.
• TrailBlazer highlights the path when a person arrives at a member of that path, so that at a later date users can re-pickup the path and finder their destination.
• Users remember how a page looks and not necessarily logos, so we have full large thumbnails of the last seen portion of the page.
• Users remember relatively when they visit pages so we order paths top to bottom chronologically.
• Most importantly users remember the CONTENT of the pages so we have summaries generated and index the pages so you can filter your history in real-time by content, thus displaying only the paths that pertain to what you are looking for. All nodes in those paths become subtly smaller and de-saturated so you don't lose your bearing and can find related pages.

The only thing MosaicG shares out of that design is that the pages are shown hierarchy, but even then, they displayed quite differently. MosaicG make the most recent pages larger, while TrailBlazer orders them by the time you access. There's a very good reason why both projects chose to layout their hierarchies in there respective ways.

MosaicG had a different design philosophy, they were trying to make sense of the web people were browsing at that moment. We (with TrailBlazer) were trying to empower people to easily return to pages that they don't visit often, but do know about and want to get back to.

The final and very important detail when comparing TrailBlazer and MosiacG, while the screen shots may fool you, is that TrailBlazer is a GLOBAL history and MosiacG's history is a SESSION history. Which makes a BIG difference in their use.

MosaicG was limited by the technology of the time and they even mention that in their paper, so maybe TrailBlazer's design is an evolution rather than an revolution, as it's not the first graphical history, but that doesn't mean it's not new or not innovative.

I wrote HistoryTree back in 1996.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote a similar browser add-on in 1996. It won some awards. Here's an early page about the project:

http://web.archive.org/web/19961223200819/http://s martbrowser.com/

-Matt Jensen
Seattle

Re:Thumbnails - Colours - I Win!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't remember backgrounds, but I do remember how the web pages smell. Sometimes not the web pages, but just the room when I was browsing, like if I had a big dinner and farted a lot while I found some new site. I wish they could thumbnail that. Mmmmmmm fresh farts.

TrailBlazer: been there done that

[axcelis]

Just a quick note that TrailBlazer, while very cool, is almost exactly like a program called HistoryTree, which I used in 1996. It was designed by a company called "Smartbrowser", (whose web site I can no longer find). The same programming team developed "MacBrain" (the first desktop Neural Network program)in 1997, and "Evolver" (the first commercial genetic algorithm software) in 1992. If anyone knows what they're doing now... please let me know.

Thanks,
Scott

Why look at history?

[MikeFM]

My favorite thing to do with my browser history is to search it. I index the pages as they go through my proxy server and then I can search them based on keywords and how recently I looked at those pages. I do something similar with my bookmarks. IMO it's far more useful than trying to visually pick out something I went to and have forgotten because usually I can't remember the name of the site or what it looked like.. just the few keywords I was interested in about the site. It'd be great if our web browsers offered this as a feature.

hey, i resemble that remark;-)

[airdrummer]

dunno 'bout nobody else, but when i'm immersed in my code, i'm in a place where i see the relationships between objects, data, methods...an abstract hyperspace that is _very_ visual, much like the way music goes 3d when i rilly get into it;-);-);-)

sounds like simulation sickness;-}

[airdrummer]

it's caused by the disconnect between the motion the eyes see & the inner ear _doesn't_:-p any flight viz. does it 2 me... sim.sicknes has been known since the early days...a friend @ nhtsa tells me the driving sims back in the '60s make subjects sick...and the better rally drivers they tested got sick quicker...

HyperCard, dammit!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is hardly the first or the last feature of the amazingly well-designed HyperCard application for Mac System 6 that would do well to be integrated into modern user interfaces. (Fully scriptable interface widgets, anyone? Who remembers the excellent "Message" box feature?)

The biggest ball Apple ever dropped was not committing more resources to HyperCard. (They never even bothered to add proper color support; it was eventually handled through some weird third party code that Apple bought, in like 1995!) If they would have followed through, HyperCard would own Flash's market share, and (depending on Apple's willingness to have opened the format) possibly even have superceded HTML. Not to mention all the kiosk and database front-end capability. YES, it was that good.

Would be useful for undo/redo, too.

[rice_burners_suck]

Interesting. I thought of a very similar idea about 7 years ago, when I was writing a text editor to fulfill specific purposes. I asked myself why all the programs out there with an "undo" feature are only able to go "backwards" (and those with a "redo" feature can only go "backwards" and "forwards").

Suppose you've written something. Then, you undid the last sentence or two. You wrote something else. By doing so, you've essentially deleted the "redo" information of the sentences you originally undid. Therefore, if you don't remember what you had written the first time, there is no way to "undo" this "branch" and go back to the other "branch" unless you had originally planned to do so and saved the file, or copied the original text into a buffer, or something along those lines.

I imagined that the undo/redo information would have to be structured somewhat as a tree, or hierarchy, of edits, much like CVS is structured with multiple branches and the ability to fork, merge, etc. To solve all the problems that I foresaw, the model became pretty darn complicated (about as complicated as re-implementing all of CVS inside of the undo/redo feature, plus supplying an interactive user interface for this mess), so I never implemented it.

I suppose that at some later point, when I began browsing the web, I thought that something similar should exist for browsers. Every time you go "back" and go on a different path, you basically create a branch. But eventually, I came to the conclusion that having just the simple "back" and "forward" feature has some advantages over a branch-enabled navigation feature. For one, it is much easier for non-tech-savvy users to understand (if they even know the feature exists--many people are really only aware of the "back" button). And furthermore, it allows you to cover up your tracks, to some extent. Say, you're at a public library, and you just used their web browser to find something. And suppose you can't delete the internet cache because of security settings on that machine. So you go "back" a few times, type in a new web address, and you've essentially erased your tracks, as far as any patron without administrator access will ever know. (I assume that if you can't erase the cache, another non-admin patron can't read it.)

I would still love to have this feature in my web browsers (and text editors), as I like to have lots of windows open all over the screen, and I juggle from one to another, and routinely go back and forth many times. With the ability to go back and open another "branch" in another window with a few keys, I think I could be a lot happier with my web browser.

In other words, if a slick interactive way to do this kind of stuff can be implemented, then I see at least two applications (browsers and undo) that would greatly benefit from such a thing.

Re:Would be useful for undo/redo, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tree undo editor:
I would be interessted in the concepts of the editor you mentioned. Can you send me info about it?
My e-mail is i see at macnews.de (with an underscore after the "i")
Thanks iSee

Making A Better Browser History

[jellomizer]

Get a Time machene and go back to the 1980s with the latest version of mozilla or safari and release the source to the public. Then we may have a better browser history. With Microsoft pulling their hair out on how it was released so fast.

Why Panther-only?

[mactari]

It's something of a pet peeve of mine (one such rant here, mainly the part starting with "What the heck?!") that so many projects *require* the latest OS without actually *needing* it. I'm cautiously suspicious this might be one.

What about Trailblazer requires 10.3? Certainly not the Java-Cocoa bridge for Lucene; that's been around a while. Nor is it AppKit; I've got AppKit (the Safari rendering engine) working with a Java app I've written pretty easily on 10.2 (which, of course, also uses the Jav-Cocoa bridge).

Seeing how all that's left is creating "click-capturing" graphics for display on the neat history page, and I'm curious what shortcut they took that cut out every OS X user that didn't buy their Mac recently or shell out a Ben Franklin to upgrade.

Other than that gripe (aka, "I can't use it, and can't think of a good reason why they've made it so."), it looks great. Wish I'd thought of that!!

Nifty

[diez]

It definitely seems useful, but at the same time, to me, is a bit bland. I like it though.

Jakob Nilsen already did

[voidstin]

IANAL, but does this count?