Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
Physicists get Hadrons!
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.
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.
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.
Beep beep.
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.
Underholdning.info
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.
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?
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.
Net sa best, mar it koe minder
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:/ 01/23/w ebkit.html
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004
So no, no Gecko.
JT
______ This mind intentionally left blank.
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.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
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).
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.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
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.
Net sa best, mar it koe minder
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...
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.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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
-------
artlu.net
<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>
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
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.
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
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...
must... stay... awake...
With all of the privacy baggage aside, imagine providing a browser history to your counselor to see how effective a particular treatment might be.
-- In Soviet Russia, radio listens to YOU!
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!
Cool. Now we need a mozilla plugin to do just that. Any volunteers?
Now where's the copycat mozilla plugin...?
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.
"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.
http://betterdifferent.com - A