Browsing the Web With a Tree
May 12th, 2008
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:
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!
Entry Filed under: Technology
18 Comments Add your own
1. Chris Adams | May 12th, 2008 at 19:47
IIRC, the webmap feature in IBM’s Web Explorer was close to what you’re asking for: a dynamically-generated unordered list of your browsing history. Unfortunately, it never made it off of OS/2.
2. Dorai Thodla | May 12th, 2008 at 20:02
This can actually be done as an extension to existing browsers. No need for a new browser. I often use browser history. This view should be just an option.
An alternate simple view implemented in many portals (like Plone and Drupal) is to provide breadcrumbs ( a tree collapsed into one line display).
3. alurie | May 12th, 2008 at 20:10
You could probably implement this yourself as a firefox extension. OR someone else could. The hard part would be figuring out what way you want to display the tree.
4. Stephen Deken | May 12th, 2008 at 20:20
Tabbed browsing makes this even more egregious: my browsing history usually looks like A(BC)(DE), where (BC) are simultaneous, and (DE) are simultaneous.
5. Nemo | May 12th, 2008 at 20:42
Your request is neither new…
http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/04/03/31/0513245.shtml?tid=126&tid=185&tid=95
Nor is the solution unknown
http://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers2/270/
And there are even still people who remember MosaicG and want equivelant implemented…
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=652629
That we still don’t have it just shows how the lowest common demoninator can still win out. The basic history we have is seen as “good enough”
…/Nemo
6. Josh | May 12th, 2008 at 21:02
iRider does this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRider. It uses the left toolbar to show a nested list of previews of all pages you are viewing. Ad you open a new link it gets added to the list, and you can jump to any page by simply clicking on it. It blurs the lines between tabs and history. It’s a little dated though, and uses IE for rendering.
7. w3m | May 12th, 2008 at 21:09
The text mode browser w3m allows this but in a linear layout: when you select a page in the history and click a link, it inserts the new page after this page and pushes up the pages “in the future” (your B branch). I find this extremely handy.
8. Brock | May 12th, 2008 at 21:26
You should check out the Tree Style Tabs Firefox extension. I use it to display my tabs along the left side of the browser — when you open a child page into a tab it shows it heirarchially and the child gets its own back-button history. Super fun!
9. bpgergo | May 12th, 2008 at 21:27
Sorry, this is off:
I find the to be sort of funny.
And I am very curious what was the idea behind choosing it as a background image for the title of your blog?
on this post:
I’ve been surfin the web since 95, (Netscape was the browser back than) and I vaugly remember when I first realized this annoying behavior of the back button. Maybe this is why I barely use the back buttion?
What I’ve been using instead was open in new window/tab and history.
10. admin | May 12th, 2008 at 21:32
bpgergo: That specific picture is actually from my travels around Europe a few years ago. Originally, I had a blog that served mostly as a travel blog (http://jacob.sheehy.ca) and so the picture made sense with the theme. Though I suppose it’s a bit off topic now that I write mostly about technology, I could never decide on another header style that I actually liked. The Hungarian parliament building is pretty much the coolest place ever, so it stuck with me.
11. Erik Hinzpeter » Br&hellip | May 12th, 2008 at 21:53
[…] been meaning to do something along these lines for ages.. still strikes me as an excellent Firefox plug-in. Trying to track down a page in a […]
12. jose | May 12th, 2008 at 22:05
i wound up sniffing my own traffic to build these graphs.
http://monkey.org/~jose/software/http-graph/
13. Mike | May 12th, 2008 at 22:31
This is annoying. It’d save me untold RAM if I didn’t open every new link in a new tab to avoid losing history.
Of course, we wouldn’t want to confuse the LCD: a tree can’t be browsed using only forward and back buttons. I’m still amazed that 99% of people don’t even get that they can access deep history by clicking the drop down menus next to the forward/back buttons rather than clicking through sequentially. Try explaining parent and child nodes and the difference between the root and a leaf.
14. Vamsee | May 13th, 2008 at 10:28
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890
Thats why I like firefox.
15. DavidM | May 13th, 2008 at 11:45
Ah yes, the beloved and hated Web Explorer! As the commenter above mentions, it had a tree based history that did exactly this. It was freakin’ awesome! You could have the display sort the tree nodes in any one of several ways (depth first vs. breadth first to CS folk), and it had a number of different options for how to log them, too.
Now do understand that in every other way that browser sucked, but that is a feature I’ve always missed! Perhaps a firefox plugin would be good!
16. Andrew | May 15th, 2008 at 9:23
Safari’s history will show A B C D. It’s still a list, but it does show all the pages you’ve visited in chronological order.
17. bise | May 15th, 2008 at 16:48
It is the same with the firefox history, it will also show D C B A. But the back button won’t do this way, So back means going back the branches to the place you are coming from: D C A. History shows you all place you have been. So the solution would be to open the history in the sidebar and change the view to order by last visited.
18. Back and Forward Buttons &hellip | May 22nd, 2008 at 17:04
[…] post makes an excellent point, and doesn’t even take into account things like dynamic Ajax pages […]
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