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."

Comments

The cyberspatial compass

[Space cowboy]

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

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[wiggys]

Yeah yeah great idea... shame about the reality.

In my experience, every single attempt to recreate a heirarchical system (be it a file system, database or in this instance a browser history) fails utterly because it doesn't adhere to the K.I.S.S. principle.

Virtual Reality (oh that is sooo 1990s!) systems often make things much more complicated to use no matter what the graphics are like... it's very easy to get lost in VR space, you have no concept of "up" or "down" (no horizon, no gravity) and trying to control your view quickly and effectively using a keyboard and mouse is very tricky, unless you're a seasoned Descent player.

However, arranging the history in a 2d manner (such as the tree view mentioned here) seems a far better way of going about it - everything you need is within your field of view, arrange in a consistent way (eg all rectangles are same size... unlike a 3d view where they appear to be smaller as they are further away) and you can tell at a glance what the relationship is.

2d vs 3d - It's kinda like the view a general gets on a battlefield (2d) versus the rather limited perspective a soldier has of the action (3d)

Re:The cyberspatial compass

[mblase]

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.

The Real Question

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Thumbnails?

[Short Circuit]

Am I the only one who doesn't want to be reminded of some of the sites he's seen? Like *cx?

Opera's History

[skermit]

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.

Very nice

[groomed]

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.

Filter Google results using browser history

[jobbegea]

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.

Re:Perhaps it will find it's way to Mozilla?

[jonathan_ingram]

which is a Gecko base

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

A modest suggestion

[dborod]

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.