Lossless Web Navigation with Trails
medium.com
medium.com
I'm not convinced of this feature. It provides a large visualization, that costs a lot of screen space, and I don't see what user need all that extra information is providing.
I often find myself opening several new tabs while browsing, and suddenly wanting to go back to a certain page I've seen.
To do this, I need to search for the tab which contains the page that I want to revisit in its history, which is a pain.
Another option is to look through the browser history, but you loose the navigation process; so if you would like to access the page that you visited after this one (that you opened in a new tab), you will have to go through the history again.
What about an advanced search feature that would look not only in the current page but also in the pages you visited recently?
The URL bar could also be smarter and show autocompletions from site you visited recently higher, and display when you last visited them.
It doesn't track actual tab history, I couldn't figure out what the best way to implement that functionality would be....
Why is back/forward history helpful on a single tab? (I leave this as an exercise for the reader) That reasoning more or less applies to cross-tab history/state. Previous behaviour was that people contained most of their browsing to a single tab (because browsers didn't have tabs, or they weren't commonly used). Behaviour has changed now to be more cross-tab.
Technically, chrome already encode information like this, I too put it down as a future project to try and parse it.
Ultimately, this info provides context, and things like e.g tab lineage (which tabs are related) and grouping can be derived from history.
Where/how does chrome encode the information? Depending on what's available and how accessible it is, I might be keen to start looking into it.
I think it's a fairly common occurence for me that I feel like I need to rewind from my current position without losing any of my current context. Especially when I'm tracking down a solution to a specific bug or error message, something that is specific but could have multiple solutions.
Im not convinced this UI is the best solution to this (I built my own implementation of something like this) but I definitely identify with the problem
If you have any specific suggestions how to improve UI to make it even better for that use case we'd be happy to get feedback.
When I'm researching a subject (like general research), trying a few different approaches for search queries and keywords until I get a result page with some promising results. Opening the promising results in background tabs, but at some point I just click, when I believe it's the last promising result, which then replaces the search result page and its history of previous queries. Then I try the opened tabs, quickly scanning them, closing some if they are obviously not what I need. At some point I decide I may need some more searches, but which of the tabs again had the history with the search queries in them? Did I close it maybe? It's often easier to coax Firefox's awesomebar into revealing one of my recent searches/history and continuing from there cause trying to dig up that one tab with the history you need, at best it only takes me completely out of my flow :)
There's a section at the end about how we got to this approach. You're right that there isn't too much detail there, though.
In short, research on how people interact with information sources shows that we rely on the kinds of connections we're trying to preserve as important queues for remembering and mentally sorting information.
As other posters here have pointed out, purely looking at the informational content it'd be enough to copy over the current tab's history stack when opening a link in a new tab. That doesn't mean that this information is easily consumed, though: while the degree to which this is true varies from person to person, by and large our mind works in a way that we have a hard time grasping connections between nodes in a graph without seeing enough of it at the same time and being able to map it out. If the only way to get any insights into the graph is to look at each tab's history stack individually, that's fine for compuers, but just not too useful for people.
See Patryk's earlier post on this topic (and the post's bibliography) for much more background information: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/browserhistory-2abad38022b1
>But if I try to revisit this later, it’s impossible. I can remember what I found, but it wasn’t a linear progression, therefore my browser history is useless.
If I want to find a page I visited more than three days ago, seeing a tree of history is not going to help me much more than seeing a linear list. There is just way too much information to sift through manually.
The obvious solution is to add full-text indexing by page content. And maybe even store pages for offline use. Perhaps when you enter special browsing mode akin to "private browsing" (although it would be the exact opposite, since it would retain more information).
I am aware of the complex issues this would require to solve, but those capabilities would qualitatively transform browsing and give users back some modicum of control over their page navigation. These days Google is our history. We remember a few keywords and instead of sifting through a giant list of URLs we simply search. Again, sifting through giant tree is not going to be any simpler. In fact, in terms of visual identification it might be more difficult than skimming a list.
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Some simple machine learning algorithm that learns to bookmark and auto-tag pages would be an awesome feature/experiment as well.
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And filtering open tabs by a keyword. Many people use tabs as a sort of dynamic set of bookmakers. Partly because they (sort of) preserve page content locally.
I built something that did exactly this, over ten years ago! I was a much less capable developer then, and it never worked as well as I wanted, so it was never truly finished.
Today this would be even harder, with the prevalence of web pages that are actually _heavily_ dynamic apps. Navigation to a new "page" is a much fuzzier concept now. What gets indexed? How do I generally know what content is/is not addressable by URL?
> And filtering open tabs by a keyword.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...
"Add % to search for matches in your currently open tabs."
This kind of stuff is why I am an advocate of progressive enhancement. It's not about whether someone has JS disabled or not. It's about using HTML as a semantic representation of information rather than a mere rendering layer. The second option might seem more convenient at times, but the first one opens a lot more doors for innovation in the long run.
Imagine if every time you stopped using a fork or a bottle of soap, it disappeared and went into a giant box where you have to search for it by name. Much easier to just have things laid out spatially so when you need something you go to where you used it last. Over time things find a place to live.
If you wanted to track which articles you read on a site and which you didn't, maybe this type of interface would be useful, but that is what :visited and :active are for.
(By the way, does anyone else think Hacker News should properly implement :active with a different color than :visited so that you can tell what article you just read if you wanted to jump to the comments or look at the next article in line?)
For example, I have tab A, I cmd+click on some links to open them in other tabs. I go read the other tabs. Then, it would help me greatly to have a way to go back to the original tab A. But I'm more after a visual indicator or something non intrusive than a change of paradigm with tons of useless information.
[1] http://www.guidingtech.com/assets/postimages/2010/11/tabgrou...
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
A history graph, on the other hand, seems like a lovely thing to have. My version control systems and my text editor already represent history as a dag, and it's nice to see the same capability arriving in the third of the tools I use all day, every day.
In my experience the opposite is true; Tree Style Tabs makes it easy to close an entire tree of tabs once you're done with a topic. Or alternatively, to move out one tab which contains the "result" (e.g. the lawnmover that you'll end up buying after 4 hours of research) and then get rid of the rest.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/overtab/leceanmnoa...
Are there any disadvantages to this approach?
From a user perspective, my main pain point is the prior history running out at the point where I opened a new tab. In many cases I've already closed the tab it came from, and if it's not closed I have to go looking for it.
"Desktop" apps that put more UI in a single module than could fit on a phone screen are basically unlearnable for the majority of users anyway. At best, they learn a familiar "trail" through the app and ignore most of the UI. Might as well break it up on purpose, since that's how people use it.
Well, that or civilization will collapse.
Trails would likely get confusing / complicated quickly, and possibly pose problems for SPAs that interact with tab history.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-tree/
Ok if you want you can also render several such trails in a graph with overlaps.
Now I don't advocate for it to be an average main feature, but an opt-in or plugin would be awesome.
It's on my dillo patch TODO list for a year.
Is there any way to work around this?