Changes

A The places history system is a redesign of the Global History component in Firefox global history systemusing the new sqlite-based mozStorage APIs. This system provides additionalperformance, flexibility, and supplying additional querying capabilities to application developers. Questions about the history re-write can be sent to brettw<AT>gmail<DOT>com.

Separate but related is the See also:* [[Places]]* [[Annotations]] service which can store arbitrary information about a page for extension developers, and the new * [[Firefox:2.0_Bookmarks]] system that will probably also use the mozStorage interface.

=== Places history features === The major places history views will be queries over places visited by time. Theuser will be able to select any date range and see when they visited each page.Actually showing which pages were visited during a given time period means wewill have to store every time the user visits any page, rather than just thelast visit time. This fixes some problems with the old history system whereitems would move around if you visited them again. These view should be as organized and as concise as possible. The old historysystem includes many redirect pages in the view, and doesn't have things likefavicons and good grouping that might make it easier to locate pages ofinterest. As a result, favicons for every page will be stored for viewing inhistory, and we will provide better domain-style grouping and a calendar forpicking days rather than a tree view. The second most user-visible history feature will be keyword searching. Thiswill be essentially unchanged from the old system, which is too bad because thecurrent system sucks. Because there is no word index, we do a brute-forcesearch over all titles for the keyword in question. While sometimes useful,this is not always what you want, resulting in a number of third-party historyindexing products. Long term, it would be nice to index pages you visit. Forthe coming release it might be nice to provide a hook for third-party productsso they can provide text searching capabilities to the places system. The last major change will be the ability to define complex queries over thehistory and bookmark systems. Most users will not be generating such queries,but they can be used to provide a variety of nice features. For example, aquery folder can be created for "My favorite pages" which contains the 20 mostfrequently visited URLs in history. A query for the most frequently visitedpages that are not bookmarked provides a good candidate list for suggestingboomarks. === Example === This screenshot shows some of these ideas: http://maxradi.us/post/moz_wiki/history_grouping.png All pages have favicons for better visual differentiation and grouping. Pagesare arraged into "sessions" consisting of followed links. Typing a new URL orfollowing a bookmark gives you a new "session" which appears as a dotted linein this image. This is an actual screenshot, but the ugly redirect pages havebeen manually removed. Proper tracking of redirect pages is pending, see[[ImageBrowser_History:browser_history_session.pngRedirects]].