Better UI's for navigating browsing history. The current approach is 10-20 open tabs, self-categorized bookmarks, and a history feature that lacks full-text search of content.
> and a history feature that lacks full-text search of content
...and a history feature that's nearly unusable. I don't even trust it anymore - Chrome's history UI feels like it's losing information, and there've been plenty of times I'm 99% I visited a page few days or weeks before, but it's nowhere to be found in history. And honestly, I don't even need full-text search. I need a table with the following columns: page URL, page title, and access time. I need that table to be sortable by these columns, and filterable by their values.
In a way, we've regressed from the days of IE 5, back from the time where browser cache was a folder. Because back then, I could open that folder, sort it by date, and guess the sites I visited from the name of the files - that being a much better UX than what I get in Firefox today.
This is a problem that Google tackled themselves, but it had too many problems[0]. Recent attempts use Chrome Dev Tools[1] to cache the results. So this may alleviate problems Google had. Memex had attempted this, but deprecated it:
> We realized although its a valuable feature to search your browsing history, its not solving a super frequent and painful problem for users
...
> We spent so much time on building the search and with it also 30-50% more time on every new feature because of interdependencies with the amount of data produced. End2End encrypted sync, backup, search performance, search filters, all were directly or indirectly necessary to work much better than we can afford. We're just 2.5 devs.
Another developer attempted this, too. But didn't have many users:
> I'll also point out that I did collect usage stats for a time, and they were horrific. At my peak I had ~5000 installs and out of those 5k something like 3-5 searches/day was the norm.[2]
One user does point out the reason why this may not have took off:
> about once every two months, I am looking for something that I swear I came across on the Internet at some point. However, the rest of the time, I'm able to re-find it just by doing another search, whether on search-engine-of-choice, or a search box on particular-website (e.g. socnet, stackoverflow, reddit, github, hacker news...).[3]
>> I'll also point out that I did collect usage stats for a time, and they were horrific. At my peak I had ~5000 installs and out of those 5k something like 3-5 searches/day was the norm.[2]
Here's then a problem I wish people worked more on: structural support for products/features that are used rarely, but when they're needed, they're really needed. Browser history interface falls under this: it's rarely needed, but when you open it, it's usually because you really need to find something again that's not easily found through web search.
Agreed. There are a few full text/archiving solutions out there but they all seem to be very manually driven. Automating that properly seems to be hard to make slick enough.
One very easy win though would be to address the fact that history in browsers only allows you to see and sort by the most recent date you visited a page. So you can't really answer the question "what are the pages I visited in March this year?" (for example) with any confidence and you can't be sure you've got all the pages you visited in a particular cluster if you might have gone back to one of them later.
Having digged through my history on Firefox it seems it has gone backwards... Like now it's something popping up from side and horribly slow. Plus I remember being able to remove sites in navbar by delete... But now that is gone...
i'm working on this as a browser extension. to get my feet wet i created Yet Another Speed Dial (https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial) which many people find useful, but the end goal is to apply the same kind of richness to all bookmarks and history
