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This article points out (correctly) that tabbed browsers throw away information about how tabs are connected, but it fails to give any argument for why that inf

by toomim 10y ago

This article points out (correctly) that tabbed browsers throw away information about how tabs are connected, but it fails to give any argument for why that information is valuable. I'm not convinced of this feature. It provides a large visualization, that costs a lot of screen space, and I don't see what user need all that extra information is providing.

x0137294744532 10y ago
> but it fails to give any argument for why that information is valuable. I often find myself opening several new tabs while browsing, and suddenly wanting to go back to a certain page I've seen. To do this, I need to search for the tab which contains the page that I want to revisit in its history, which is a pain. Another option is to look through the browser history, but you loose the navigation process; so if you would like to access the page that you visited after this one (that you opened in a new tab), you will have to go through the history again.
- MasterScrat 10y ago
  I agree this happens but their solution looks overkill to me. What about an advanced search feature that would look not only in the current page but also in the pages you visited recently? The URL bar could also be smarter and show autocompletions from site you visited recently higher, and display when you last visited them.
- awongh 10y ago
  If you use a cmd + click workflow to open a new tab I built a chrome extension that tracks the parent/child tab: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/overtab/leceanmnoanolhdkonbapdkplgikipon https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/overtab/leceanmnoa... It doesn't track actual tab history, I couldn't figure out what the best way to implement that functionality would be....
- hashhar 10y ago
  Check this experimental addon from Mozilla. https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/activity-stream https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/activity-stream
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
  Tree style tabs for Firefox...
dorian-graph 10y ago
I would love to have a feature like this and I've written it down as one of my side-project ideas. Why is back/forward history helpful on a single tab? (I leave this as an exercise for the reader) That reasoning more or less applies to cross-tab history/state. Previous behaviour was that people contained most of their browsing to a single tab (because browsers didn't have tabs, or they weren't commonly used). Behaviour has changed now to be more cross-tab.
- Chris2048 10y ago
  Any projects like this already, or a repo? Technically, chrome already encode information like this, I too put it down as a future project to try and parse it. Ultimately, this info provides context, and things like e.g tab lineage (which tabs are related) and grouping can be derived from history.
  - dorian-graph 10y ago
    Not that I know of aside from this what this blog post describes, and the couple of prior work it lists. Where/how does chrome encode the information? Depending on what's available and how accessible it is, I might be keen to start looking into it.
CharlesDodgson 10y ago
I tend to agree on this, is there a need to keep every trail in the process? probably not. It's just ephemera, In computing there seems to be an overriding drive to stockpile it for some future date when we will have the ability to analyse it.
awongh 10y ago
sometimes I get to a dead end and want to navigate back to where I was, but have somehow lost the thread of how I got there, either b/c I was doing cmd + click and lost the tab and / or closed it or because it's now buried in the current tab's history. I think it's a fairly common occurence for me that I feel like I need to rewind from my current position without losing any of my current context. Especially when I'm tracking down a solution to a specific bug or error message, something that is specific but could have multiple solutions. Im not convinced this UI is the best solution to this (I built my own implementation of something like this) but I definitely identify with the problem
- igozalishvili 10y ago
  One of the primary goals of this UX is to address that specific problem. It may not be the best UI for that specific task, but that's not only use case it supposed to serve. I would also argue it's far better UI than ones present in the current browsers. If you have any specific suggestions how to improve UI to make it even better for that use case we'd be happy to get feedback.
- tripzilch 10y ago
  > sometimes I get to a dead end and want to navigate back to where I was, but have somehow lost the thread of how I got there, either b/c I was doing cmd + click and lost the tab and / or closed it or because it's now buried in the current tab's history. When I'm researching a subject (like general research), trying a few different approaches for search queries and keywords until I get a result page with some promising results. Opening the promising results in background tabs, but at some point I just click, when I believe it's the last promising result, which then replaces the search result page and its history of previous queries. Then I try the opened tabs, quickly scanning them, closing some if they are obviously not what I need. At some point I decide I may need some more searches, but which of the tabs again had the history with the search queries in them? Did I close it maybe? It's often easier to coax Firefox's awesomebar into revealing one of my recent searches/history and continuing from there cause trying to dig up that one tab with the history you need, at best it only takes me completely out of my flow :)
tschneidereit 10y ago
(Member of the browser.html team here) There's a section at the end about how we got to this approach. You're right that there isn't too much detail there, though. In short, research on how people interact with information sources shows that we rely on the kinds of connections we're trying to preserve as important queues for remembering and mentally sorting information. As other posters here have pointed out, purely looking at the informational content it'd be enough to copy over the current tab's history stack when opening a link in a new tab. That doesn't mean that this information is easily consumed, though: while the degree to which this is true varies from person to person, by and large our mind works in a way that we have a hard time grasping connections between nodes in a graph without seeing enough of it at the same time and being able to map it out. If the only way to get any insights into the graph is to look at each tab's history stack individually, that's fine for compuers, but just not too useful for people. See Patryk's earlier post on this topic (and the post's bibliography) for much more background information: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/browserhistory-2abad38022b1 https://medium.freecodecamp.com/browserhistory-2abad38022b1
- romaniv 10y ago
  From the link: >But if I try to revisit this later, it’s impossible. I can remember what I found, but it wasn’t a linear progression, therefore my browser history is useless. If I want to find a page I visited more than three days ago, seeing a tree of history is not going to help me much more than seeing a linear list. There is just way too much information to sift through manually. The obvious solution is to add full-text indexing by page content. And maybe even store pages for offline use. Perhaps when you enter special browsing mode akin to "private browsing" (although it would be the exact opposite, since it would retain more information). I am aware of the complex issues this would require to solve, but those capabilities would qualitatively transform browsing and give users back some modicum of control over their page navigation. These days Google is our history. We remember a few keywords and instead of sifting through a giant list of URLs we simply search. Again, sifting through giant tree is not going to be any simpler. In fact, in terms of visual identification it might be more difficult than skimming a list. ... Some simple machine learning algorithm that learns to bookmark and auto-tag pages would be an awesome feature/experiment as well. ... And filtering open tabs by a keyword. Many people use tabs as a sort of dynamic set of bookmakers. Partly because they (sort of) preserve page content locally.
erikpukinskis 10y ago
I suspect the primary value will be the ability to find things again. Imagine if every time you stopped using a fork or a bottle of soap, it disappeared and went into a giant box where you have to search for it by name. Much easier to just have things laid out spatially so when you need something you go to where you used it last. Over time things find a place to live.
bluetwo 10y ago
I wish they used an example in which the history of how the decision is made is relevant. In this case, how you found the new pizza place is unimportant. You find it. You go. If you like it you go back. If you don't like it you do another search and skip over this place. If you wanted to track which articles you read on a site and which you didn't, maybe this type of interface would be useful, but that is what :visited and :active are for. (By the way, does anyone else think Hacker News should properly implement :active with a different color than :visited so that you can tell what article you just read if you wanted to jump to the comments or look at the next article in line?)

by toomim 10y ago

x0137294744532 10y ago

> but it fails to give any argument for why that information is valuable. I often find myself opening several new tabs while browsing, and suddenly wanting to go back to a certain page I've seen. To do this, I need to search for the tab which contains the page that I want to revisit in its history, which is a pain. Another option is to look through the browser history, but you loose the navigation process; so if you would like to access the page that you visited after this one (that you opened in a new tab), you will have to go through the history again.

MasterScrat 10y ago
I agree this happens but their solution looks overkill to me. What about an advanced search feature that would look not only in the current page but also in the pages you visited recently? The URL bar could also be smarter and show autocompletions from site you visited recently higher, and display when you last visited them.
awongh 10y ago
If you use a cmd + click workflow to open a new tab I built a chrome extension that tracks the parent/child tab: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/overtab/leceanmnoanolhdkonbapdkplgikipon https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/overtab/leceanmnoa... It doesn't track actual tab history, I couldn't figure out what the best way to implement that functionality would be....
hashhar 10y ago
Check this experimental addon from Mozilla. https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/activity-stream https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/activity-stream
gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
Tree style tabs for Firefox...

dorian-graph 10y ago

I would love to have a feature like this and I've written it down as one of my side-project ideas. Why is back/forward history helpful on a single tab? (I leave this as an exercise for the reader) That reasoning more or less applies to cross-tab history/state. Previous behaviour was that people contained most of their browsing to a single tab (because browsers didn't have tabs, or they weren't commonly used). Behaviour has changed now to be more cross-tab.

Chris2048 10y ago
Any projects like this already, or a repo? Technically, chrome already encode information like this, I too put it down as a future project to try and parse it. Ultimately, this info provides context, and things like e.g tab lineage (which tabs are related) and grouping can be derived from history.
- dorian-graph 10y ago
  Not that I know of aside from this what this blog post describes, and the couple of prior work it lists. Where/how does chrome encode the information? Depending on what's available and how accessible it is, I might be keen to start looking into it.

CharlesDodgson 10y ago

I tend to agree on this, is there a need to keep every trail in the process? probably not. It's just ephemera, In computing there seems to be an overriding drive to stockpile it for some future date when we will have the ability to analyse it.

awongh 10y ago

sometimes I get to a dead end and want to navigate back to where I was, but have somehow lost the thread of how I got there, either b/c I was doing cmd + click and lost the tab and / or closed it or because it's now buried in the current tab's history. I think it's a fairly common occurence for me that I feel like I need to rewind from my current position without losing any of my current context. Especially when I'm tracking down a solution to a specific bug or error message, something that is specific but could have multiple solutions. Im not convinced this UI is the best solution to this (I built my own implementation of something like this) but I definitely identify with the problem

igozalishvili 10y ago
One of the primary goals of this UX is to address that specific problem. It may not be the best UI for that specific task, but that's not only use case it supposed to serve. I would also argue it's far better UI than ones present in the current browsers. If you have any specific suggestions how to improve UI to make it even better for that use case we'd be happy to get feedback.
tripzilch 10y ago
> sometimes I get to a dead end and want to navigate back to where I was, but have somehow lost the thread of how I got there, either b/c I was doing cmd + click and lost the tab and / or closed it or because it's now buried in the current tab's history. When I'm researching a subject (like general research), trying a few different approaches for search queries and keywords until I get a result page with some promising results. Opening the promising results in background tabs, but at some point I just click, when I believe it's the last promising result, which then replaces the search result page and its history of previous queries. Then I try the opened tabs, quickly scanning them, closing some if they are obviously not what I need. At some point I decide I may need some more searches, but which of the tabs again had the history with the search queries in them? Did I close it maybe? It's often easier to coax Firefox's awesomebar into revealing one of my recent searches/history and continuing from there cause trying to dig up that one tab with the history you need, at best it only takes me completely out of my flow :)

tschneidereit 10y ago

(Member of the browser.html team here) There's a section at the end about how we got to this approach. You're right that there isn't too much detail there, though. In short, research on how people interact with information sources shows that we rely on the kinds of connections we're trying to preserve as important queues for remembering and mentally sorting information. As other posters here have pointed out, purely looking at the informational content it'd be enough to copy over the current tab's history stack when opening a link in a new tab. That doesn't mean that this information is easily consumed, though: while the degree to which this is true varies from person to person, by and large our mind works in a way that we have a hard time grasping connections between nodes in a graph without seeing enough of it at the same time and being able to map it out. If the only way to get any insights into the graph is to look at each tab's history stack individually, that's fine for compuers, but just not too useful for people. See Patryk's earlier post on this topic (and the post's bibliography) for much more background information: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/browserhistory-2abad38022b1 https://medium.freecodecamp.com/browserhistory-2abad38022b1

romaniv 10y ago
From the link: >But if I try to revisit this later, it’s impossible. I can remember what I found, but it wasn’t a linear progression, therefore my browser history is useless. If I want to find a page I visited more than three days ago, seeing a tree of history is not going to help me much more than seeing a linear list. There is just way too much information to sift through manually. The obvious solution is to add full-text indexing by page content. And maybe even store pages for offline use. Perhaps when you enter special browsing mode akin to "private browsing" (although it would be the exact opposite, since it would retain more information). I am aware of the complex issues this would require to solve, but those capabilities would qualitatively transform browsing and give users back some modicum of control over their page navigation. These days Google is our history. We remember a few keywords and instead of sifting through a giant list of URLs we simply search. Again, sifting through giant tree is not going to be any simpler. In fact, in terms of visual identification it might be more difficult than skimming a list. ... Some simple machine learning algorithm that learns to bookmark and auto-tag pages would be an awesome feature/experiment as well. ... And filtering open tabs by a keyword. Many people use tabs as a sort of dynamic set of bookmakers. Partly because they (sort of) preserve page content locally.

erikpukinskis 10y ago

I suspect the primary value will be the ability to find things again. Imagine if every time you stopped using a fork or a bottle of soap, it disappeared and went into a giant box where you have to search for it by name. Much easier to just have things laid out spatially so when you need something you go to where you used it last. Over time things find a place to live.

bluetwo 10y ago

I wish they used an example in which the history of how the decision is made is relevant. In this case, how you found the new pizza place is unimportant. You find it. You go. If you like it you go back. If you don't like it you do another search and skip over this place. If you wanted to track which articles you read on a site and which you didn't, maybe this type of interface would be useful, but that is what :visited and :active are for. (By the way, does anyone else think Hacker News should properly implement :active with a different color than :visited so that you can tell what article you just read if you wanted to jump to the comments or look at the next article in line?)