>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.