Show HN: A Tree-Based Way to Navigate Browsing History | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A Tree-Based Way to Navigate Browsing History

joeltg.github.io

I've been wanting this for years. I worked on the Chrome team and wanted to make something like this the built-in way to browse history.

Instant install :) Thanks!

Thank you! Let us know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions.

On a side note, we were really torn on whether to use favicons or tab screenshots as the node images. If anyone has design opinions on this, we'd love to hear them!

This is really cool! Thanks for making it.

Browser history uses favicons, but I think I would go with tab screenshots. In your browser history, because everything is collapsed into a line, it's harder to parse a logical grouping, so having similar favicons helps. But in Visual History, because the history is tab specific, you don't have that problem. You are more likely to need to differentiate between different pages on the same site, making favicons less useful.

Regardless, this is really cool, and I'll definitely be sharing it.

Safari, please!

We're planning on it! We'll both have some free time in January to work on this some more, and Safari is a high priority.

It'd be awesome if `Esc` closed the visualization, it took me a moment to figure out I had to click the icon again to close out of it.

... Also, I just realised it overrides cmd+arrow keys. Those are super important for navigating in text on OS X! Unfortunately I'll have to disable until it doesn't do that, since there doesn't seem to be an option to remap or disable those keybinds.

You can remap or disable keyboard shortcuts in chrome://extensions, I believe! (you might have to enable developer mode first)

Edit - also, dismissing the view with esc. or clicking anywhere is something I should have done from the start. Thanks!

Was it something that languished in the feature backlog, or was there an intentional decision against it? Just curious :)

I think that with sufficient determination I could have pushed it through, but it was a side project, I was a junior engineer, & I would have needed significant design resources & buy-in to get it to shippable. I believe it would have been possible (Chrome is an especially open & flat structure within google, compared to e.g. Android), but I wasn't willing to go through the effort at the time. I ended up leaving Google to be one of the first engineers at Transcriptic :)

I've been wanting to build something like this. It would be really cool to see all tabs' histories side by side rather than just the current tab. Even though a tree gets wide pretty quickly, you're seldom using multiple tabs simultaneously, so if you make line-height a function of time, you shouldn't have too many items on a row.

Do you know any similar add-on for Firefox?

As far as I know, there's nothing else out there, unfortunately. But porting Chrome extensions to Firefox add-ons is pretty easy, so hopefully we (or anyone else!) will get around to that soon.

Edit: I stand corrected

I found this after a bit of searching:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-histo...

Note: I haven't tried it and it's last update is from 2013.

this is beautiful, definitely the type of stuff you see get added to major browser versions.

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