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Making A Better Browser History

Posted by timothy on from the and-a-browser-is-a-mousetrap dept.

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."

6 of 291 comments (clear)

  1. Opera's History by skermit · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    -Christopher Wu
    http://www.christopherwu.net/
  2. Similar thing in 3D by SpatialJ · · Score: 3, Informative
    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

  3. see also by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    spidergraph (it plugs into Mozilla)

  4. Re:Perhaps it will find it's way to Mozilla? by jonathan_ingram · · Score: 5, Informative

    which is a Gecko base

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

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    -- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
  5. Re:What won first place? by operagost · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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    Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
  6. Re:The cyberspatial compass by Eccles · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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    Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.