Histree

Intro

Histree is, or soon will be, a Mozilla extension. It adds, or soon will add, a sidebar to your Mozilla Firebird web browser. This sidebar contains a tree which presents a novel view of your browsing history.

Traditional web browsers employ a linear model of a user's history, most familiarly embodied by the "back" and "forward" buttons. This model is inadequate for certain sequences of user actions. Consider the following scenario:

  1. Alice starts her browser and goes to site abc.com, which contains links to def.com and ghi.com.
  2. Alice clicks the link to def.com. Now her browser is showing def.com, the "forward" button is disabled, and the "back" button is set to take her back to abc.com.
  3. Alice clicks her browser's "back" button. Now her browser shows abc.com, the "back" button is disabled, and the "forward" button is ready to take her back to def.com.
  4. After reading a few screens' worth of text on abc.com, Alice clicks the link to ghi.com. Now her browser shows ghi.com, the "forward" button is disabled, and the "back" button points to abc.com.
  5. Alice remembers something she wanted to do on def.com -- but wait! Even though she's visited it quite recently, def.com is nowhere to be found in the "back" or "forward" buttons or their pull-down menus! Her only option is to click "back," and then to scroll back through who-knows-how-much-text on abc.com, searching for def.com's link. Alice's web browser has made an implicit value judgment about the usefulness of def.com, purely because of the way she happened to enter and leave it.

Clearly, what we have here is not a line, but a tree.

I have to confess, though, that I never really cared for these sourceforge-hosted pages that make it hard to find actual info about the project, so just go look at the HisTree project summary page instead.

Development Links

Here are some things that may be useful for development.

Credits

Paul Hebble 9 December 2003

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