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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."
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.
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.
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.