
Lossless Web Navigation with Trails - ivank
https://medium.com/@patrykadas/lossless-web-navigation-with-trails-9cd48c0abb56
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toomim
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
> 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.

~~~
awongh
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/leceanmnoa...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/overtab/leceanmnoanolhdkonbapdkplgikipon)

It doesn't track actual tab history, I couldn't figure out what the best way
to implement that functionality would be....

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kuon
A feature that would interest me more, is to have a visual indicator of tab
parent tab.

For example, I have tab A, I cmd+click on some links to open them in other
tabs. I go read the other tabs. Then, it would help me greatly to have a way
to go back to the original tab A. But I'm more after a visual indicator or
something non intrusive than a change of paradigm with tons of useless
information.

~~~
nine_k
Firefox has an addon called Tree Style Tab [1] that makes tabs form a tree,
with parent/child relationships made obvious. It helps me enormously.

[1]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-
ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

~~~
throwanem
I used to use it, but found that it encourages poor tab hygiene - the lousy
default UI actually provides an IMO useful constraint in that it quickly grows
easier to sweep stale tabs and windows into a todo or for-later-reading list,
or just dispose of them, rather than put up with the annoyance of letting them
clutter the UI.

A history graph, on the other hand, seems like a lovely thing to have. My
version control systems and my text editor already represent history as a dag,
and it's nice to see the same capability arriving in the third of the tools I
use all day, every day.

~~~
morsch
_I used to use it, but found that it encourages poor tab hygiene_

In my experience the opposite is true; Tree Style Tabs makes it easy to close
an entire tree of tabs once you're done with a topic. Or alternatively, to
move out one tab which contains the "result" (e.g. the lawnmover that you'll
end up buying after 4 hours of research) and then get rid of the rest.

~~~
gjjrfcbugxbhf
Even better is that you can bookmark a whole tree of tabs. And reopen later.

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thinkmoore
There is some great existing work in the academic community on better models
for web interactions:
[https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/mk-
in...](https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/mk-int-safe-
state-web/)

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brad0
I agree there's a problem here but why not just copy the history of the origin
tab to the new tab when it's created?

~~~
DennisP
That's what I was thinking. Don't need fancy graphics, just make the back
button work further back than the tab creation. Doesn't even have to be a
copy, if they make the history a tree structure in memory.

~~~
tschneidereit
That last part doesn't work, unfortunately. We looked into doing exactly that,
but the way history navigation works is specified quite strictly - and relied
upon by existing web content - making this infeasible.

~~~
DennisP
I don't see how this could be true. From the perspective of a web page, it'd
be exactly the same as if the user's new-tab clicks were regular clicks
instead.

From a user perspective, my main pain point is the prior history running out
at the point where I opened a new tab. In many cases I've already closed the
tab it came from, and if it's not closed I have to go looking for it.

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nathanathan
I would like to see a split screen mode applied to trails. Seeing the current
page along side the page I visited to get to it would work well on a lot of
the sites I visit. For instance, it would be useful to see the main page of HN
along side pages I reached from it and be able to click on the HN links to
alter the content of the other panel similar to the way side navs work in many
apps.

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erikpukinskis
I think this kind of windowing system matches nicely with mobile-first design.
This kind of UI becomes even more powerful when you can fit several full apps
on the screen at once. I think in the long run, all tools will be designed to
fit a mobile form factor, and larger screens will just be for looking at
multiple items at once, and for better zooming. Kind of like a newspaper.

"Desktop" apps that put more UI in a single module than could fit on a phone
screen are basically unlearnable for the majority of users anyway. At best,
they learn a familiar "trail" through the app and ignore most of the UI. Might
as well break it up on purpose, since that's how people use it.

~~~
brennen
Here's a bet (confidence level: I don't know if I really think this, but I
might think this): Long-term, the size constraints of "mobile" displays are
likely to be an aberration for most applications. We'll get some kind of head-
mounted display / glasses with high resolution and a bunch of augmented-
reality fanciness, while other interface features disappear into wearables and
the environment, and in 10 or 20 years, the phone-sized displays that have
come to seem normal will mostly be as forgotten as the temporary popularity of
"netbooks" from a few years back.

Well, that or civilization will collapse.

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retube
Meh. Don't like this. For me I _like_ their being no history associated with
the new tab - then I never lose track of a central "research" tab and the
various separate avenues of exploration that I've opened. IE actually colour
codes tabs grouping together pages that have been opened in separate tabs
which is handy.

Trails would likely get confusing / complicated quickly, and possibly pose
problems for SPAs that interact with tab history.

~~~
icebraining
Have you tried Tree Style Tab? The hierarchic presentation is perfect for that
kind of exploration, in my opinion.

~~~
NTripleOne
Man, I'd love to use some kind of hierarchical tab layout, but I like tabs go
horizontal and take up basically zero screen real estate (that wouldn't
already be taken up, eg title bar, etc)

~~~
icebraining
Tree Style Tab has the auto shrink feature, where they take just a slice and
then expand on mouse over.

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EGreg
Why not just prepend the history of the opener window to the history of the
opened window? Simple.

Ok if you want you can also render several such trails in a graph with
overlaps.

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prashnts
In Chrome on Mac you can cmd+click on Refresh, Back or Forward button which
opens a new tab with navigation history preserved.

~~~
tedmiston
Nice shortcut. Looks like the same result as Ctrl-Click > Duplicate Tab.

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fridsun
For all who question "why not just copy history to new tab?": it is part of
the trail design. By saying they are not throwing the tab away they have most
probably already done that. This will be another screen to view the trail,
like the tab exposé on mac safari.

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agumonkey
visuals apart, for years I've been searching for browsing history stored as
graphs. There's so much information there. I would google my own privacy with
this so much.

~~~
Zalastax
History in browsers and editors should absolutely be a trer so we can do
changes without the risk of losing a state we want. If you undo/go back and
then make some change it's often impossible to reach back to before the undo.
Why is history as a tree not a more common feature?

~~~
agumonkey
Emacs has an undo tree and it can be confusing, maybe browser devs tried and
it ended up the same way.

Now I don't advocate for it to be an average main feature, but an opt-in or
plugin would be awesome.

It's on my dillo patch TODO list for a year.

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reitanqild
Meta: medium seems to switch urls between every user, making bookmarking tools
less useful.

Is there any way to work around this?

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joemaller1
Git for web history?

