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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."
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.
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.
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
Soccer Goal Plans
That's exactly what this browser makes far more manageable!
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.
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 :(
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.
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?
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
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.
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.
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.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
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.
:D
I don't think I've clicked that "history" button in months. Of course, it could be my fish memory too
---- Take the Space Quiz!
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
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...:-\
doooh