i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

So, I know we've talked about visual representations of browser history before, and tonight, while reading lifehacker (ie, procrastinating for 202), I found two recommendations for firefox plug-ins. I just installed both of them.

The first, History Tree, looks awesome. It displays a simple visual history; it sorts by tabs, and includes backtracking as well as showing how you got from one page to another. I'm definitely going to be using this one.

The second, Voyage, takes a different approach. It displays your browsing history as a web of nodes, and the size of each node indicates how often you've visited. The edges between the nodes indicates the path that you took between them. It looks cool, but I think History Tree is easier to understand. Also, this plug-in is still "experimental", so be warned.

Here's a screen snapshot of my History Tree tonight. The orange box is the current active window. The question marks below each box will give you a snapshot of the site, and the arrow collapses the trail. I think Vanevar Bush would like this!

And here's Voyage. I think it might get more interesting when I visit more sites. As I said, it looks cool, but I don't know how easy it would be to retrace your steps.