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However, some experts argue that the browser history is less broken than these researchers suggest. Larry Constantine, a usability expert and professor at the University of Madeira, in Portugal, notes that some browsers already make sophisticated and hidden use of history information. For example, the Firefox 3 browser is good at guessing URLs from a user's history based on keywords entered in the address bar. Whether the browser history is useful, he says, "depends a lot on which version of the browser people are using and on their personal habits."
Jared Spool, founding principal of User Interface Engineering, a consulting firm based in North Andover, MA, says that people tend to revisit pages by retracing the way that they found them in the first place. "It's sort of a cliché, but we are creatures of habit," he says.
If the first path to the information worked well and quickly, it's not natural to seek out a second path, Spool says. He's not sure that most users would change their behavior even if the history were better designed, but he sees potential for using it for specific purposes. For example, he says, authors might want to use an improved browser-history tool to revisit research resources, or a company's employees might use such a tool to help them navigate a poorly organized intranet, which might contain material that's harder to search than is content on the wider Internet.
Spool says that the ideas behind the prototype history tool are likely to filter into consumer products in a very different form. "What we're seeing here is the first piece of the pollination process," he says.
Indeed, the Carnegie Mellon researchers point out that browsers are already starting to explore alternate ways to use data from people's browsing habits. For example, Google's Chrome browser features a "speed-dial" page when a user opens a new tab that shows thumbnails of frequently visited websites. Carnegie Mellon's Hong notes that a redesign of the browser's history could be particularly helpful for less Web-savvy users, who might have trouble figuring out the steps of the path that they originally took to a piece of information.
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?
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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.
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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 ;)
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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 :)
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