Firefox/Feature Brainstorming:History

« Firefox/Feature Brainstorming

History management

• Maintain document state in history
  • You fill out a long form, click Submit, and an error occurs. You click Back and sometimes all of your form data is gone. I think it has to do with the page having a short TTL so it is re-requested from the server and re-rendered with a blank form.
  • Allow users to go back through history and see exactly what was entered in the forms on pages.
  • Never save password fields except through existing functionality
  • Allow user to enable/disable feature
  • Keep javascript engine state in memory for Ajax-heavy pages. Back button used in Ajax applications should take you back to the page as you last saw it, not as it was first requested from the server.
  • After going back scroll document to the link/position, where user left the page
• Maintain seperate document and image cache check frequency
  • As discussed at mozillaZine

History manager

• Ability to automatically or manually tag history
• Ability not to add broken links (404) to the history
• Integrated Bookmarking
• Integrated use of social bookmarking rankings to show page popularity
• Sort history by time the page was closed, rather than opened. As such, if the browser crashes, everything that was open will automatically be at the top of the history. Likewise, if I close a page I opened last week, it will still be near the top of my history.
• Full screen utilization for history browsing
• History accessible via calendar views (day, week, month, year) and navigation-tree view
• Let the user choose which details of a history entry shall be shown for browsing (e.g. show time and date or only date)
• Global history navigation & presentation
• Session history navigation & presentation (handling iframes & modern DOM tricks)
• Spatial history navigation. http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Browser_20History_20Diagram (links down left hand side)
• History could show a list of pages visited that can be sorted according to the fields seen in Page Info.
• History could show a tree of pages visited with the nodes being where people have hit the back button and then clicked on a new link.
• History could also show the web pages visited along with all the media they link to in a hierarchy of directory locations similar to what would be seen in a mirror of the websites visited.
• Page or scroll through thumbnails of pages visited (somewhat similar to how a user can scroll through CD covers in iTunes).

General History UI improvements

• Remove Alt+S shortcut opening History-Menu.
  • Many widely used webapps (like vBulletin) and webforms use the known shortcut Alt+S to save/submit data.
  • Rather: educate users about using Alt+Shift+S to submit forum posts.
• Right clicking on Back/Forward buttons (or the menu items that appear when you click the down arrow buttons next to them) brings up the same context menu that appears when you right click on a link on a page (open link in new tab/window, bookmark/save/send/copy link, properties).
• Right click context menu for new tab on list of previous sites from back button icon. Right click for new tab on home button icon.
• Properties menu item in right click context menu (as in HistProp extension)
• History submenu to reopen recently closed windows (like now with tabs) : it could be merged with the actual feature and be called something like "reopen recently closed pages".
• History submenu to reopen recently terminated sessions.

History search

• Full-text indexing of history
• Search using metadata / full page text from cache
• Make it possible to search in the contents of all the pages you visited last x hours/days/months/years.
• ability to search with sections of website
• X button to clear search

History view metaphors with Page Info

Ability to select links in this hierarchy and tell the browser to get all the links it points to. This could be used to generate a list of files that can be downloaded to provide a mirror of desired sites with a great deal of control. One would then like to select a group of files by individual selection or by hierarchical groups to archive or explore for new links. This is essentially a webspider interface for the browser.

History and tabs

Preserve history when ctrl-clicking to create a new tab. Essentially, let me ctrl-click to create a new tab, switch to that new tab, and then hit the 'back' button.

Clickstream recording/browsing/mining

• There is a lot of interesting stuff that could be done if we recorded clickstreams as part of history, particularly if that data could be used to generate usage patterns and so forth.

References

• Rob Campbell's clickstreams brainstorming

Sort history by time instead of name within a day

• If you are visiting a lot of pages especially on the same server and then look into the history it is very hard to find a certain page pased on the title. It would be nice to have the option to sort by time the page was opened, so that you have a time order within the date sorted history.
  • Sort history by time of closing tabs for the same reason.

Tree-shaped history

• If you are at a site (site A), and push back a bunch of times to get to (site B), are then follow a different site to get to another site (site C) it is no longer possible to use the forward button to get to site A again. This should be fixed by storing a tree of the forward and backward locations, and use an interface that allow you to branch when going forward.
  • This proposal seems to me to be conceptually similar to proposals in the research literature for rewinding of UNDO stacks along N branches. What I recall from the literature is that this proved, in trial usage, to be complex to very problematic, particularly with respect to usability. If this proposal is implemented, then it might be wise to consider whether the Back/Forward behavior should default to the 'traditional' linear implementation and only turn on the 'branching' support on explicit user request (e.g., as a 'power user' feature). Jabbott 10:09, 16 October 2006 (PDT)
  • This may be a difficult feature to develop, as Jabbott has suggested, but it is something I have wanted for more than ten years. I agree that there should be an option for linear vs branchy history. But that option should be announced at the top of the dropdown history list, so that users know of this novel feature. ehume 2006-10-17 2313 EDT
  • It might be possible to use a single History-Stack for doing this. So when navigating from A to B, back to A, and then to C the History-stack might look like:

    Site C
    Site A
    Site B
    Site A

    Note: the redundant Site A at the end might get removed when presenting to the user, but is needed internally.

    I also would like to have it possible to let the user decide which solution (the current ot this) she prefers. MovGP0 10:11, 19 October 2006 (PDT)

  • See the TrailBlazer UI. That one could be intuitive AND useful from a user perspective and shouldn't be hard to build (at UI level): it's just a "table" with tabs shown on different rows and timeline on the columns. This solution I think that will make the history REALLY usable (in conjunction with other features like search, tag, export, print (!),etc.). Note: this interface will be on a separate window: Back/Next will work as usual.

History view and web page view merged

History is merged in web page view thanks to zoom in and zoom out. A view of a web page is supposed to be a zoom on one item of the history.

• You first navigate ordinary on the web :

(large image)

• Then you decide to view the history :

(large image)

Web page view is zoomed out. What trigger the zoom out could be a button on the interface or a particular move of the mouse.

• You see all the history where all the pages are represented with a preview :

(large image)

The current web page is at the center. A stickman indicates that it is the current page. You can then scroll the history. The web page represented below is a newer page (it supposes that you have come back to the current page). The pages above are older pages. Arrows indicate the order of page visit. Arrow above the current page doesn't start on the page just above because you have visited two pages and then you have decided to go back.

• You can scroll the history and pass your pointer over the web page preview :

(large image)

When your pointer is over a preview, the web page becomes blue. A note indicates the elapsed time since the first web page visit.

• Clicking on a web page preview zoom in the web page :

(large image)

You can go to a page by clicking on the preview and then the history view is zooming in.

• You have returned to an older page :

(large image)

With this feature, the old history panel would be no longer needed.

Firefox Needs A Built-in SESSION MANAGER!

The current release, 2.0.0.1, of Firefox does not support SESSION MANAGER Extensions by various Extension developers and these developers for the most part have given up playing "keep-up" with the various Firefox releases because of the substantial demands on the very limited time they can devote to keep SESSION MANAGER updates compatible with new releases of Firefox.

That brings us to TODAY. The SESSION MANAGER functionality--the ability to save groups of open Firefox tabs as "Saved Sessions" having various names and to reopen these groups at a later date--is a MUST for most Firefox-ers. Just look at the online posts for these Extensions and see the furor developing because the developers for these SESSION MANAGER Extensions just don't have the time to rewrite or completely re-develop their Extensions every time Firefox comes out with a new release. Many Firefox-ers are even choosing NOT TO UPDATE their Firefox browser just so they can have the functionality of the SESSION MANAGER Extension that's compatible with older versions of Firefox. This creates a SERIOUS SECURITY RISK to these non-updaters, as now their Firefox browser may be susceptible to various security flaws.

P  L  E  A  S  E:   A "SESSION MANAGER" has now become "standard" for most Firefox-ers and at least the "basic functionality" of a full-featured "SESSION MANAGER" should be BUILT INTO FUTURE RELEASES OF FIREFOX. ~~~~~ <;)))>< ~~~~~ --NakedStranger 20:17, 31 December 2006 (PST)

References

• On Tagging
• Design Composite -d-
• bug 40873
• Design Composite -d-
• Thumbnail session history
  
• Use a metaphor closer to TrailBlazer
• HistProp extension