ChangeLog – Jon Chase's blog

Right now, the offerings from the different Internet browsers for viewing your browser history are a bit…plain. There’s the dropdown in the address bar of pages visited. There’s also the ever popular Back button. But users at large could benefit from something better, something more intelligent, and something more in line with what they actually need.

All browsers provide now is a basic textual list of sites that have been visited. Imagine your checking account statement – page after page of black ink on white paper with a boring list of check numbers, dollar amounts, and such. Ever have trouble remembering what you wrote a check for? Imagine if, instead of receiving this list in the mail every month, you instead received a glossy full color print out of every check you wrote, along with a full color 3×3 picture of the place you wrote the check, and even perhaps a photo of what you purchased. Wouldn’t that be a little more user friendly, a little easier to navigate? I propose something similar (although, hmmm, that would be a nifty way to do bank statements online…), but for browser history.

So how about it, plugin developers? Someone please create a visual browser history explorer. Take the boring, dull, black and white list of pages visited, and turn it into a glossy full color interactive print out that would dramatically improve a user’s browsing experience.

Big Picture

The general idea is this: provide a Google Earth type experience (zoom in, zoom out, pan, etc.) for displaying browsing history.

Look, I even went ahead and developed the first prototype:

Features

There would be filters to help limit the amount of history shown. By filtering on some criteria, unmatched history would be grayed out (or conversely, matching history could be highlighted). Some filters that come to mind:

• Date range (filter out history not visited between date A and B)
• Text matching (filter out pages without matching text (or highlight areas in pages with matching text)
• Domain matching (filter out pages not in the specified domain)

Additionally, clicking on a page of a given domain could highlight all other pages from the same domain. There could be a whole list of associative criteria to choose from when clicking a page (similar dates visited, similar titles, etc.).

Pages from like domains that were visited sequentially in the history would be visually indicated by a translucent bubble (circle) around them. Also, other colored bubbles could be used to group pages using other criteria (all pages visited in a single session, pages visited in the last hour, pages that contain your last Google search term in the text, etc.).

Frequently visited pages could be made “bold”, perhaps outlined in a darker, more prominent color to give them perceived weight (or visually stacked one on top of another). In fact, stacking in general could be useful to organize pages when there’s just too much going on: stacking pages by the date they were visited creates an orderly list of pages visited throughout your work week, etc.

Smooth zooming from the far out (panorama) view up through bringing a page to 100% magnification of the view port (i.e. a user could view a large amount of their history, then zoom in on a particular page until that page filled the entire screen, and could then start browsing that page).

Ability to zoom a page to, say, 80% of the viewport (probably the page would be displayed at 100% magnification, but the edges would be clipped as if in a smaller browser window), then provide a visual transition when clicking from one page to the next: the current page would slide out and the next page would then slide into view (like the iPhone?). This would give users a visual context for the “direction” they are traveling. To add to this context further, the view could slide in the appropriate direction to coincide with navigation within a particular domain. For example, a user starts at www.example.com. Then goes one directory down to www.example.com/news. In this case, the new page would slide from the bottom of the screen to the top to replace the old page. Then going down another directory, say to www.example.com/news/today, the new page would again slide in from the bottom of the screen to the top. Next, navigating to a parallel directory, www.example.com/news/thisweek, the new page would slide in from right to left, to indicate the “virtual” level of browsing is staying the same. Clicking the back button once would slide the page from right to left, indicating traversing backwards.

A browser hot key that when pressed when viewing a page normally, would zoom out so that the page got smaller and the history could be seen around it in context.

Some fancy layout algorithm (organic, orthogonal) could be used to intelligently arrange the different windows in the history view.

The original idea for the type of graph layout came from yFiles Ant Explorer, I believe. Here’s a picture of their graphical Ant explorer (with a much more complex UI, obviously):

Perhaps someone will be motivated to take action after seeing the drastic difference between a boring old tabular layout, and a shiny visual one. In that vein, have a look at the demos here.

If you run with the idea, it is yours to do with whatever you wish. All I ask is a mention somewhere, and to let me know if you do use it.

Good luck, plugin developers!!