Firefox/Feature Brainstorming:History

« Firefox/Feature Brainstorming

Specific features	References
History management Ability to add annotations Ability to automatically or manually tag history Ability to automatically or manually archive contents in history in a variety of ways Option to store all text from all pages (possibly excluding https and preset sites) ever visited -- this would let you revisit pages that disappeared off the internet, and also do very good search through history. At 100 pages per day, and a very generous 10k per page (storing text-only, not scripts and images), this would be about a third of a gig annually, so manageable storage requirements by modern standards. Store the images and scripts too - I'm happy to spend $94 on a 320GB drive to dedicate to my Mozilla History - it'd save me accumulated days over a year of searching for stuff I've previously seen (coupled with the elsewhere mentioned full-text search). The above text-only suggestion could be a "Only Store Page Text" preference on a full history (and I'm sure would be useful for a subset of users). Anyway, this is going to require a retrieval engine faster than we currently have. Ability not to add broken links (404) to the history Ability to delete a page by rightclicking on the URL in the Location Bar dropdown Ability to put a page on a blacklist (i.e. never show it in the history) Ability to disable the history for the current session with a click/keycombo Maintain document state in history You fill out a long form, click Submit, and an error occurs. You click Back and sometimes all of your form data is gone. I think it has to do with the page having a short TTL so it is re-requested from the server and re-rendered with a blank form. Allow users to go back through history and see exactly what was entered in the forms on pages. Never save password fields except through existing functionality Allow user to enable/disable feature Keep javascript engine state in memory for Ajax-heavy pages. Back button used in Ajax applications should take you back to the page as you last saw it, not as it was first requested from the server. After going back scroll document to the link/position, where user left the page	- On Tagging
History search Full-text indexing of history Search using metadata / full page text from cache	Design Composite -d-
History browsing Global history navigation & presentation Session history navigation & presentation (handling iframes & modern DOM tricks) Spatial history navigation. http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Browser_20History_20Diagram (links down left hand side) Full screen utilization for history browsing Remove Alt+S shortcut opening History-Menu. Many widely used webapps (like vBulletin) and webforms use the known shortcut Alt+S to save/submit data. Integrated Bookmarking Integrated use of social bookmarking rankings to show page popularity Sort history by time the page was closed, rather than opened. As such, if the browser crashes, everything that was open will automatically be at the top of the history. Likewise, if I close a page I opened last week, it will still be near the top of my history. Right click context menu for new tab on list of previous sites from back button icon. Right click for new tab on home button icon. History accessible via calendar views (day, week, month, year) and navigation-tree view Let the user choose which details of a history entry shall be shown for browsing (e.g. show time and date or only date)	Design Composite -d- Thumbnail session history Use a metaphor closer to TrailBlazer
History view metaphors with Page Info. History could show a list of pages visited that can be sorted acording to the fields seen in Page Info. History could show a tree of pages visited with the nodes being where people have hit the back button and then clicked on a new link. History could also show the web pages visited along with all the media they link to in a hierarchy of directory locations similar to what would be seen in a mirror of the websites visited. This would be a combination of History and the links tab of Page Info that is already available. Another version of this is to have a hierarchy based on links. Page a links to pages c, d, e, and f while d links to a, f, g and h. In this case a and f would both have 2 entries in the history. This could be usefull in creating static mirrors of dynamic content websites. Further functionality could be achieved by being able to select links in this hierarchy and tell the browser to get all the links it points to. This could be used to generate a list of files that can be downloaded to provide a mirror of desired sites with a great deal of control. One would then like to select a group of files by individual selection or by hierarchical groups to archive or explore for new links. This is essentially a webspider interface for the browser	n/a
General tasks
Revisit location bar Better management Search enhancements	n/a
History and tabs
Preserve history when ctrl-clicking to create a new tab. Essentially, let me ctrl-click to create a new tab, switch to that new tab, and then hit the 'back' button.	n/a

HISTORY NEEDS COLUMNS -- Forgive my clumsiness, I'm new to this. History needs columns. Specifically, if you click-n-drag the width of history, it just has titles of the web pages. It would be very nice to have a column with DATE (even time) visited, so you could search a word and locate a website visit from, say, a month ago, and then switch to date mode and go back there, browsing among the other sites you visited at that time. If you remember finding paydirt, or finding something that was dull then but now you realize it's paydirt, but can't remember a word or a date&time, that extra column could mean that you score. Less vital, but handy, would be a column of URLs. Let's say you think a URL virused you, and would rather not click back into it just to find out the webpage ADDRESS. (A right-click function here would do as well as a column, although less helpful to the newbie.) -- from yankeedam, new member

HISTORY WITH HOOKS -- Let's say you remember you found a bunch of great websites a month or two ago on the night you visited whitehouse.gov or whatever. You should be able to whiz back to the whitehouse web page, make it a hook, and from there, click into date/time and browse that evening's work. It should also work in reverse, where you remember discovering great photos on the ninth or tenth of last month, so you go back there and put a hook on the eleventh. Then you shift into word-search mode and explore some subject you were into on those nights. -- from yankeedam, new member