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The Internet Businesses Software Apple

Making A Better Browser History 291

Posted by timothy from the and-a-browser-is-a-mousetrap dept.
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."
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Making A Better Browser History

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  • The cyberspatial compass (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) * on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @08:41AM (#8724124) Journal

    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by wiggys ( 621350 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @08:50AM (#8724180)
      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 [uiuc.edu]) 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)

      • You mention Descent... I still get nausea and vertigo when I think about it. Thanks for the memory, bub.

        :)

        • Ive got that. I played it for about 3 hours, thinking that i'd get used to it. I didnt, and spent the next 2 days with a headache whenever I thought about it. The hardest bit was flying into a large room, having a bit of a fight, then spending the next 10 minutes trying to work out which of the 5 door you came in.
          One copy of descent 3 for sale... hardly used!


        • I still get nausea and vertigo when I think about [Descent].

          Oh yeah, but it wasn't as bad as Alien vs. Predator, playing as the alien. My wife couldn't even be in the same room as the monitor.

    • Re:The cyberspatial compass (Score:5, Interesting)

      by croddy ( 659025 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @09:16AM (#8724305)
      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.

      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.

      visual representations are often a crutch for when we simply cannot come up with anything else.

      • Actually, our minds are primarily visual and spatial. Espeically those of us who ain't coders.

        I imagine that it'd be pretty easy to recognise the site you were on last week by its branding in a thumbnail - assume it wasn't black text on a white background :p

      • Re:The cyberspatial compass (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mblase ( 200735 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @10:58AM (#8725122)
        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 [apple.com] 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.
        • 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,

          From the few minutes I tested TrailBlazer with, it seems that they resize automatically when you visit more pages. There is also a "minimum" and "maximum" thumbnail size in preferences, but they don't go lower than 150. At the size I have it right now (about 10 pages), the display fits about 5x3 pages in a relatively
      • You make a couple good points, but that last line really bugs me. Are you serious? I know what you mean: people use charts and graphs in situations they shouldn't. But you should qualify that by pointing out that it's only because people don't use them properly. I can go on and on about my data all day long [napoleonic...rature.com], or I could show you a picture [napoleonic...rature.com], and you could understand instantly. (You might say that without a paragraph of explanation, you'd never be able to understand the graphic, but the original version has a c
      • Yeah... At first I thought it was something like the newsmap [marumushi.com], with different sizes for frequency of visits (i.e., Fark and Slashdot would show up huge in mine). That might be a great way to represent this kind of information. As it it, I don't see it as being a killer app.

    • Merge bookmarks and history (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TuringTest ( 533084 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @01:33PM (#8726653) Journal
      The next step in this trend is merging bookmarks and history in a single interface. I've never seen the point in having separate panels for bookmarks and history when they are clearly related to the same task: bringing back pages that I know I've already visited.

      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.

  • The Real Question (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @08:44AM (#8724147)
    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.

    • Re:The Real Question (Score:2, Interesting)

      by bitchell ( 159219 )
      Thats a valid point. Surely the instead of making the history look better why not concentrate on making favourites look cool and a lot easy to manage / take with you on the move.
    • I don't really use my browser history much, thanks to tabbed browsing and favorites. Tabs work in the short term, and favorites in the long term. I'd much rather keep track of past-visited sites with an organized, categorized list of hand-picked sites instead of a chronological pile of probably about 100 sites a day that I passed through. I also clear my history about once every 3 days for security purposes.

  • Thumbnails? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Short Circuit ( 52384 ) <mikemol@gmail.com> on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @08:48AM (#8724165) Homepage Journal
    Am I the only one who doesn't want to be reminded of some of the sites he's seen? Like *cx?
    • Anyone else done a public demo of a web application and seen www.<some real hardcore sounding website>.com being autocompleted in the address box as you type???
    • 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.

  • Opera's History (Score:5, Informative)

    by skermit ( 451840 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @08:50AM (#8724181) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Opera's History (Score:2, Insightful)

      by swapsn ( 701280 )

      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.

    • Re:Opera's History (Score:3, Insightful)

      by sporty ( 27564 )
      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?
      • "no" to all of that, as i would assume you already know. however, i dont need any of that. like some other poster said, i keep pages i want to view reasonably soon in a tab and ones i really want to make sure i can find again in the bookmarks. if i need to find something, i can search the history. i dont need thumbnails. i suppose if you had dialup, that would really make a difference, tho. nothing wrong with this mac software in the article, i just dont have a need for it at all.
        • They were all rhetorical questions ;) The only reason i liked the thumbnail idea, is that sometimes i'm on a blind search, and forget to bookmark something, i know it's in my history, just not the url by heart. it's useful for those "I know what the page looks like, just not the title" issues.
          • "I know what the page looks like, just not the title"

            huh, i spose so. i dont remember that ever happening to me, but if it does, that would be a useful tool.
    • The problem is it doesn't scale well. If you set it to remember 5000 pages, it will take about 2-3 seconds to use quickfind on the history records. The interface would be nice if it actually worked. As it is, it's pretty useless. I find it easier and quicker to use the old html-based history to find something.

  • Relate-a-zon (Score:3, Interesting)

    by KrunZ ( 247479 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @08:52AM (#8724186)
    This reminds me of the game Relate-a-zon [relate-a-zon.com] 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.

  • Similar thing in 3D (Score:3, Informative)

    by SpatialJ ( 411269 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @08:52AM (#8724187) Homepage Journal
    Clara [spatialknowledge.com] has a similar approach. Here though, fully interactive thumbnails are stored in a spatial arrangement and can be relocated to your personal flavour.

    OpenSource, scriptable, customizable ad infinitum integradete IRC for spatial use and finally a good reason besides games to have a fast graphics board

    Videos [spatialknowledge.com] and images [spatialknowledge.com] available

  • I'd be happy with something even simpler... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Realistic_Dragon ( 655151 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @08:52AM (#8724189) Homepage
    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.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • The problem is - no browser will work if you do that. Browsers were not designed for that and if you increase the cache too much, they break (or just start working very slowly). Not to mention that they don't have necessary search facilities built-in and using external search tools doesn't allow access to metainformation (when the page was opened, do you visit it often, where did you come to that page from, what links did you click there, etc.).
    • Hmm. It should be possible to do something like this using a proxy server, so it would work with any browser. Just hook something like Lucene in and index everything.

      Plus, you could then get the proxy server to intercept certain pseudo-urls and treat them as search queries, so the whole system would be browser based and transparent to the user. ie - request something like http://history.search/ to show a search form, or something like http://quick.search/your+query+here to jump straight to results pages.

    • i've used something like this called mantadb under windows:

      MantaDB v02.03 - MantaDB is a very useful
      set of utilities for Microsoft Internet
      Explorer. Included with MantaDB is a Web
      Page Database that indexes the words that
      on view in your browser, a utility to
      check for dead links on web pages and
      smaller utilities to numerous to mention.
      From: Net 2000 Ltd. (Win95, 98 2000, NT4)

      a similar windows product still under development is called hindsite [isysdev.com]

      it is a bummer these are both windows only products. does anyth

  • prolly not (Score:4, Insightful)

    by aixou ( 756713 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @08:53AM (#8724193)
    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.

    • Re:prolly not (Score:2, Interesting)

      by esarjeant ( 100503 )
      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

  • Information Overload (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Yeep4711 ( 743300 )
    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.

  • see also (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @08:56AM (#8724216)
    spidergraph [sf.net] (it plugs into Mozilla)
    • I just tried out spidergraph from the install links on their website, as the parent suggested. Here's my experience. (Mozilla 1.4, Windows 2000).
      1. Install went fine, restarted mozilla
      2. First thing I noticed was it disables tabbed browsing - that's no good!
      3. I tried clicking the big spidergraph button. It brought up a nifty little graph with two nodes. It wasn't a graph of websites I visited, and I could never get it to change.
      4. Tried uninstalling it. It doesn't show up in preferences, and I couldn't find

  • Innovation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by peterdaly ( 123554 ) <{petedaly} {at} {ix.netcom.com}> on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @08:58AM (#8724222)
    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

  • Good as an interface (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Underholdning ( 758194 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @08:59AM (#8724225) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Silly slashdotter - you didn't bother to actually check the facts did you?

      It does include a free text search - it refines the web site thumbnails in the history map to just those that match.

  • What won first place? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by no haters ( 714135 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @08:59AM (#8724227)
    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.

    • Re:What won first place? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      EOH@UIUC covers all engineering fields, not just computers. TrailBlaizer came in second to an impressive physical demo exhibit titled "Stopping Waves with Bubbles: The bubble plume breakwater".
    • FWIW, the only original part of this idea is the thumbnails. IBM's WebExplorer for OS/2 in 1994 created a Webmap as you browsed. The killer part of this is being able to easily access pages you can't reach with the back button, because you already backtracked and then branched out in a different direction. However, they still win points for me by being the only ones to actually resurrect and improve this old idea.

  • Who actually uses their browser history? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by j1mmy ( 43634 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @09:04AM (#8724255) Journal
    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 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, trailbla

  • Very nice (Score:5, Insightful)

    by groomed ( 202061 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @09:07AM (#8724260)
    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.

    • Re:Very nice (Score:3, Interesting)

      by CountBrass ( 590228 )

      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.

    • Re:Very nice (Score:4, Interesting)

      by russellh ( 547685 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @10:45AM (#8725004) Homepage
      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...

    • Re:Very nice (Score:3, Informative)

      by N3WBI3 ( 595976 )
      http://www.w3j.com/1/ayers.270/paper/270.html

      Been there done that

  • and then patent it (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jtwJGuevara ( 749094 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @09:11AM (#8724280)
    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.

  • Filter Google results using browser history (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jobbegea ( 748685 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @09:12AM (#8724283)
    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.
    • That is a brilliant idea... BRILLIANT!!!
    • I think a step in this direction has been taken with Google [google.com]'s Personalized Search [google.com] (see the FAQ [google.com] for details). You create a profile describing your interests (either in general, or what type of thing you're interested in at the moment, just for this search). You can then adjust via a slider how closely the search results should conform to this profile.

      So if you wanted to search for an article on how to weave baskets (I know, weird example) that you had seen in the past, you could tell Google that you're int

      • 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.

    • 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

    • 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.
      • It is. Just restrict the results to sites you have visited in the (recent) past. You would use it to retrieve this single URL you forgot the bookmark but are unable to find in your history.

        Using Google for the search is much better than just searching in you browser history because then you would only search in URLs and Titles, no page bodies.

        It is a bit like using a multiple "site:" tag in your search string, except that the definition of this multiple "site:" tag is based on your browser history.
      • Google is more than just a huge database of sites. It's also a ranking scheme. Your history is often large enough that a simple keyword search would do only so much good.

        Actually, I think that Trailblazer can also do a keyword search, which would do a lot of good. After all, the pagerank would be less important given that all of the web sites you've visited have at least some importance to you.

        Unless, of course, you're using IE, in which case you've probably been sent to all sorts of web pages that you
    • It would be nice if the results of Google could be filtered using your browser history.

      How is that different than what Trailblazer is doing? It allows a full text search of your history using lucene.
    • isn't that the way it works for http://www.google.ru ? :)
  • then i realised i'm stuck on windows at work...and i'll continue to forget sites i visit while "working"..

    thanks!!!

    but seriously... port it !!
  • I know it's not 'quite' the same, but for Windows, Irider [irider.com], an internet-explorer rejib (like avantbrowser) has a tree-based history view in the left-hand pane. Sort of like a cross between what's seen in this story, and tabbed browsing.

    It's pretty neat, but I actually like having a billion different windows open, so it wasn't for me.
  • I think this is a neat idea. I like the fact that they could build it fairly quickly using the solid core of OSX (Webkit) which renders HTML easily.

    They didn't have to worry about writing an HTML parser, just built an app on top of it.

    Its nice not having to get bogged down in the details. I think open source needs a more cohesive approach to things like this (QT is a close as it gets). Ironically the hTML renderer apple uses is open source, but I imagine not installed by default in linux (unless your usi

  • But no history mechanism for students? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bazzargh ( 39195 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @09:40AM (#8724460)
    This paper [ucalgary.ca] reviews history mechanisms in web browsers back in '97. One of the mechanisms mentioned, MosaicG [gatech.edu] 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.

  • A modest suggestion (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dborod ( 26190 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @09:43AM (#8724476) Homepage
    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.

  • Probably a good idea (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ajs318 ( 655362 ) <sd_resp2@@@earthshod...co...uk> on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @09:46AM (#8724505)
    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.
    • 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.

      Being a Mac user, I have one. ;-) I know this wasn't a flame, but just because a Mac doesn't come with a multi-button mouse doesn't mean it can't use one.
      Mine's set to F9 (Expose's minimize).

      Someone else asked about the name of the Apple history viewer. Didn't it use QuickTime 3d and may have been called Project X?
    • I'd like to see tabs that were movable: within the current browser window, to another browser window or into its own broswer window.

      Like you, I often keep a browser window for a specific "topics" and have various aspects of that topic in different tabs. Sometimes I get "lost" and open something in the wrong browser window, but can't reorganize it.

  • What safari isn't meant to be (Score:3, Insightful)

    by adzoox ( 615327 ) * on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @09:47AM (#8724506) Journal
    The more code that is added to Safari the more unstable and slower it can get.

    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.

  • Memory.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by artlu ( 265391 ) <artlu@3.14artlu.net minus pi> on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @09:51AM (#8724539) Homepage Journal
    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 ;).
  • it dates to the days of OpenDoc and CyberDog. It was a visual display of a hierarchy. i believe they showed it being used to display the flow of a website. i think it started with an "x".

    any ideas?
    • You're thinking of ProjectX, which was renamed HotSauce. If I remember correctly, it was a "fly through" of spheres in fake 2D, each sphere representing a site (and surrounded by smaller spheres representing linked sites). As you approached a satellite sphere, you would begin to see its links come into view....and so on, ad infinitum.

      Here's [downlode.org] one link I found in Google "apple hotsauce browser."

  • We need a tree for browser history. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by scorp1us ( 235526 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @09:58AM (#8724588) Journal
    <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>
  • It's obvious they used the Safari render engine. Very cool idea.
  • Am I the only one who remembers this browser from ... 1995? 1996? called "Athena" (or something like that) which had a graphical history window like this one? It was from a University in Florida, I believe.. too many beers between then and now, memory's fuzzy.. :(

  • .. was also the Apple internal codename for the PowerMac 5200 [macinstein.com]. One of the first products I worked on at Apple ... *sigh*

  • Only 2D? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ryosen ( 234440 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @10:40AM (#8724968)
    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 [2ce.com]! This actually came out a couple of years ago. Fun to play around with.
  • 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...
  • A flat page history is one thing, but this is a great, unobtrusive way to chart people's attention patterns!

    With all of the privacy baggage aside, imagine providing a browser history to your counselor to see how effective a particular treatment might be.

  • Just add mouseover magnification (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Derek Mason ( 767027 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @11:42AM (#8725498)
    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 [apple.com] 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!

  • This is Excellent! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CedgeS ( 159076 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @01:18PM (#8726457) Homepage Journal
    I have frequently wished that the history in a browser was a tree, so I could go back and then forwards along a different branch. The summary doesn't mention it, but the arangement of the pages in the space is a tree built by your browsing.

    Now where's the copycat mozilla plugin...?

  • Would be useful for undo/redo, too. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @01:17AM (#8733869)
    Interesting. I thought of a very similar idea about 7 years ago, when I was writing a text editor to fulfill specific purposes. I asked myself why all the programs out there with an "undo" feature are only able to go "backwards" (and those with a "redo" feature can only go "backwards" and "forwards").

    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.

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