Technology Review
A new tool aims to make a Web browser's history more useful.
Web browsers remember the sites that they have visited in the past, but few people seem to use this information. Jing Jin, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed a new browser-history tool, which she and her colleagues developed after studying how people use their browser history. They demonstrated the prototype in a presentation this week at the Computer-Human Interaction (CHI 2009) Conference, in Boston.
"Despite the fact that bookmarks and Web histories are built into every browser, we found that people tend to either use search engines or reconstruct the path by which they got to a page in the first place," says Jason Hong, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon, who was involved in the research. "Most people either found Web history too hard to use or didn't even know that it existed."
The researchers tested users' ability to recall Web pages and found that URLs and textual descriptions (by which most browsers organize their history) weren't as easy to remember as colors or images collected from the Web pages themselves. So the researchers' tool--currently a plug-in for the Firefox browser--lets users browse images of websites that they have visited in the past, or type in search queries that find previously visited pages.
The researchers also used the new history tool to improve Web search, by adding thumbnails from browser history at the top of Google search results. The thumbnails were selected according to the search terms that the user entered into the search engine.
In testing, the researchers discovered that people could find the page they were looking for within about a minute on average using the prototype add-on, compared with an average of three minutes using the standard browser history. The user tests also showed that people were able to actually find a given old page more often with the prototype.
Eytan Adar, a PhD student at the University of Washington, is also researching ways to redesign the browser's history. He says that the current design doesn't match the way that people revisit pages. In collaboration with scientists from Microsoft Research, Adar found that people tend to visit Web pages in certain patterns. He says that it might be possible to split the history so that it treats these pages differently according to the user's patterns. For example, those pages that people revisit over and over in a short period could appear in a temporary "working queue," Adar says. The pages that they access regularly could be displayed in a more persistent list, while the pages that they revisit rarely might be accessed through a search function.
As a web developer, I use my history in a way that most people don't but that I find incredibly helpful. I use it to help track my time allocation for billing my clients. Since I am frequently switching from one projects to another, my browser history gives me a precise representation of my web site visits by time. This may be a special use case, but I wonder if simply improving the UIs for date/time-oriented browsing might generate more usage.
Hopefully I can give you a bit of advice. I am not a web developer, so please don't laugh if I make some errors in Web-specific terms :)
My method is simple and doesn't involve adding some features to the browser you are currently using, but you'll have to do some programming.
As each webpage usually includes a Title, which is displayed in the browser's window title (at least, that holds true for those browsers I've ever seen), webpage titles are useful for logging purposes, so that you can easily open a plain-text logfile later on and check which websites you were visiting at certain times.
Sure, this trick has some limitations, as some webpage titles may not include a website-specific string, but we humans are very flexible, meaning it's usualy easy for us to restore full information having only a part of it :)
As for me, I am using a simple script that I wrote myself. It runs under a special Forth-based scheduler. (It's shareware, so I prefer not to mention its name here; I've been using it for a few years under the special "ex-USSR" licence, i.e. for free.)
My script is Opera-specific (but can be easily modified to fit other browsers), meaning it's watching for active windows whose titles contain the string " - Opera" in the end and then makes sure that the application is Opera indeed (it does that by checking the full name of the process). If the double-check is positive, the webpage title is logged to the predefined file.
Ain't it simple?
A history feature I particularly like is the "Recently Closed Pages" (Firefox). It allows easy recovery from "Ah $#!+, I didnt mean to close that." :-D
But for longer term history, I sometimes have trouble relocating the page I want, especially since the thread of URLS may not have stayed on the same server.
There's a similar feature in Opera too.
For instance, I can easily retrieve any closed webpages from the current session by clicking on a cute trashcan and selecting the one I need to reopen.
Besides, I've set a 400MB limit on Disk Cache size in Opera in order to be able to retrieve pages from History in offline mode even a few days later :) By the way, the Search feature in Opera's History works very similarly to that of local search engines (Google Desktop, Copernic, etc.), meaning it's smart (just type in a few words and it instantly starts to look them up) and pretty fast!
Is this the same addon Lifehacker just reported on? New Tab King for Firefox?
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
National Instruments has gathered customer information and data regarding some of the cost differences between building a custom solution versus using NI off-the-shelf tools. Using this data, we built the Graphical System Design ‘Build vs. Buy’ Calculator. The calculator can help show the financial differences between building a custom solution versus buying an off-the-shelf system. This paper discusses the benefits and drawbacks of both a traditional custom design approach and off-the-shelf embedded tools.
View full PDF >
Listen to story > 
On Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Feed
validator
5 Comments
My two cents :)
Sorry if I offend someone's feelings but I find it irritating that too many articles give praise to Firefox and even Google's Chrome while forgetting even to mention other excellent (if not better) programs.
May I say that the name of the web browser I've been happily using for a few years begins with capital "O" - try guessing what I mean.
By the way, the latest version of the browser I am using now has been working like a breeze right after I installed it; compare that to the ultra-popular Firefox, which as I've heard often needs some plugins to be more usable.
P.S. And no, I'm not working in some software maker's PR department - just wanted to give credit to a fine program, that's all.
Reply
Erica Naone
70 Comments
Re: My two cents :)
Hi Validator,
Thanks for the comment. I love Opera, too, and use it myself at home sometimes (not all the Web apps that I use work with it, or else I would use it more). In this case, it made sense to talk about Firefox because the research was specifically a Firefox add-on. I'm aware that Chrome's speed dial is a descendant of Opera's speed dial, but, in this case, the researchers talked about Chrome because of the way it automatically integrates history with the feature.
When I write more generally about browsers, I definitely remember Opera. If you check my recent article "An Upgrade for the Web," I talked with the makers of Safari, Opera, Firefox, and Chrome (Microsoft wasn't available for comment).
Now hopefully there isn't some other great browser that starts with "O" that I've now slighted ;)
Reply
validator
5 Comments
Re: My two cents :)
Thanks for your reply!
Yes, I did mean Opera :) AFAIK, in some countries it's as popular as Firefox (Chrome being an outsider, many users like me not bothering even to try it while it's in beta stage, and some of those who have tried it complaining to others about its "rawness").
Now it's clear that I've misunderstood you, having read lots of one-sided articles that sometimes directly compare Firefox to Opera and easily pronounce FF the winner, while undeservedly forgetting to mention that some Opera features were later adopted by Firefox :)
Sure Firefox has its own strong points - for instance, it can be extended with various add-ons. (Should I say that some Opera fans develop special, "extended" versions of their adorable browser, too.)
Still, in my opinion, Opera is probably the best out-of-the-box solution for those who prefer elegant and easily tunable GUI combined with simplicity in use.
As for me, I currently use Opera's latest version as a browser + RSS reader + email client. It's all-in-one package, and works perfectly too :)
Reply