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.
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 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.
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
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
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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...
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!
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.