{ 2008 05 12 }

Browsing the Web With a Tree

Web browsers have been broken ever since their invention. There is a fatal flaw in every single web browser I’ve ever used, and I bet you’ve come across this flaw without realizing how serious it is. Sure, you may have felt some frustration, but it was likely undirected and you were unsure why you were angry (well, this is how I’ve felt over the years, anyway).

I’ve drawn a very simple diagram to explain how I browse the web:

Tree

The idea in the diagram is this: We start at page A and then visit the second page, B. From there, we go back to A (likely by hitting the back button) and then visit another link called C. From C, we will visit D. In our web browser’s history, this web browsing session is A -> C -> D. If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice that we are completely missing B from our browsing history. Don’t believe me? Try it. I should clarify that when I refer to the browser’s “history”, I am referring to what is generally a drop down menu coming from the back button. Opera, Firefox and Internet Explorer all behave this way.

Before the days of tabbed browsing, this type of behavior would drive me crazy. It is absurd that a browser would willingly forget massive history lists, when surely the user would intuitively assume that all pages they’ve visited in the past would be listed in the “back” button’s list. Of course, with today’s browsers, I virtually never run into this problem since I open nearly everything in a new tab. However, I’m occasionally still forced to use Internet Explorer 6, which suffers from having no tabbed browsing and no decent history list.

Why do no browsers portray the history as a tree, such as the one I’ve drawn above? Is it too hard to design a user interface that works well, or is there another reason? If anyone knows of a small, nearly-unheard-of browser that does actually represent browser history as a tree, I would love to know about it!

Posted by admin on Monday, May 12th, 2008, at 19:10, and filed under Technology.

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