Mobile/UI/History

A IRC discussion in #ux about whether Fennec will support the conventional browser history (for a bit of context, see the comments on Aza's blog post).

IRC log is from Aug 14, 2008:

<aza> madhava: http://www.viddler.com/explore/Azaraskin/videos/1/
<pdubroy> aza: saw your repsonse to my comment re: history in fennec. curious, 
did you just decide that history is not used often enough?
<aza> Yep. That was my feel.
<madhava> pdubroy - there is some surfacing of history, in the form of awesomebar 
results
<aza> Also, the awesome bar is the best way of...
<aza> ah, what you said.
<aza> No-cost history.
<madhava> but not as a separate section devoted just to looking through the timeline
<pdubroy> good points
<madhava> so, not so much an explicit decision to leave it out as still looking 
for a great reason to include it, if the "find something I've been to recently" 
use-case is covered by the awesomebar
<pdubroy> i've been reading the studies that look at % of navigation actions 
that from the history, and it's *very* low, <1%
<madhava> hm.  yeah, that makes sense to me
<madhava> though one could always argue that some of that comes from the obscure 
location of history in the browser
<pdubroy> yeah, although i've never been convinced whether it's because people 
don't want to use it, or just because current implementations aren't that good
<madhava> (though, clearly, I'm thinking the other way)
<madhava> right
<pdubroy> i think there's more to it than just the location in the browser, too
<aza> I think History mainly becomes useful when you have context surrounding it 
(like in Wei's video)
<pdubroy> yeah
<wei> agree
<pdubroy> i just have this gut feeling that so many things in the browser could 
be unified under some kind of history view -- bookmarks, downloads, even tabs
<aza> I like the way you think. I have the same feeling -- that there are too 
many disparate ideas that we are using as crutches.
<aza> We need one really good metaphor.
<pdubroy> yeah