We've covered a number of Web history tracking and organizing tools in the past, but Wikipedia Diver may be one of the most interesting, albeit niche. This Firefox add-on gives you a visual history of everywhere you've been on Wikipedia, and organizes it down to the day, order, and session in which you visited the sites, making it easy to revisit old entries.
Each visited page is presented as a small red globe that you can click on to advance the timeline. There's also a source list of every site you visited, that will take you right to the page.
Tiny red balls tell you how you got from looking at video game descriptions to the molecular makeup of precious metals.
(Credit: CNET)Like some other Web history trackers, Wikipedia Diver intelligently tracks when you hit the back button on your browser. Each time you leave whatever Wikipedia entry you're on to visit a link that's on that page, it simply attaches it to your history. In one entry I was looking at, I had clicked on seven different links that were on that page, and the extension kept track of how I had arrived at each of those pages. That in itself can be fun to look at--e.g. how I got from the Zoopraxiscope to the assassination of Alfred Herrhausen.
One thing it does not track are the reference links you click when exiting the site to view a source. I'd like to see this added as an option, but understandably that takes it into the realm of watching everything you do.
Also worth a mention is that all of this data is kept safe and secure on your local machine, and never sent to the cloud. Like any other extension that does this, this means that your information isn't being beamed elsewhere, although you can only access your history on that particular machine, and in that particular browser.
Firefox and Internet Explorer extension Click&Clean is aimed at those who prefer the history-sweeping CCleaner to Firefox's built-in browsing tracks sterilizer. Click&Clean takes the same number of mouse clicks or keyboard strokes to activate as the native cleaner, opening a CCleaner window preconfigured for cleaning Firefox. Obviously, you must download CCleaner for Click&Clean to work.
Click&Clean adds only a single button to your Firefox toolbar, so it won't clutter your browser window. Clicking it opened the CCleaner interface immediately, and from there you can have it wipe your tracks with the automatic configuration, or you can make adjustments to suit your needs. If you're addicted to the digital ammonia of CCleaner and you're a Firefox user, Click&Clean is one surefire way to make your hard drive sparkle.
I had a funny moment earlier this week when I showed Google's Chrome to one of my friends. She was floored that one of the top nine most visited sites featured on the browser's start page was Woot.com. Given how much browsing I do as part of this job I suppose it was surprising even to me, but it's also a hint of how intriguing your browsing history can be to others.
A service called Timelope is banking on that idea, letting users share their browsing history (or at least selected parts of it) with the rest of the world. Unlike Friendfeed which aggregates just the items you want from the sources you have chosen, Timelope posts all of your activity in one large stream and does it passively without requiring you to click on anything out of the ordinary. You can then befriend other Timelope users and see what they're looking at (almost in real time) as long as they're sharing.
All of this hinges around a browser plug-in that currently only works for Firefox. You simply plug in your user name and password and it pipes over the data in the background once the page has loaded. You can turn it on and off with a just a click, and it remembers its state between browsing sessions so you don't accidentally start sending off things you don't want others to see.
There are some obvious privacy concerns here. Making what you're viewing online public, able to be searched, and timestamped is a very open window into your habits and who you are. There are, however, some decent protection measures you can instate, like an anonymous log-in and both a black and white list for controlling which sites are shown to others, even when the plug-in is turned on.
Another company that offers a very similar service and a slightly deeper analysis of your habits, along with a way to create private groups is Hooeey, which we profiled back in late 2007. I thought then, as I do now, that these services can be incredibly useful for a certain few, but are likely to instill fear in people who are already worried enough about having their e-mail passwords stolen, let alone sharing what they're doing with strangers.
Timelope is currently in private alpha but was still accepting new sign-ups when I published this.
Timelope lets you browse other people's browser history as well as publishing your own using a Firefox plug-in.
(Credit: CBS Interactive)Someday, browsers will make it easy to retrace our Web steps by providing total recall of every page we've opened. Until then, we get the imperfect history features in Internet Explorer and Firefox.
They're imperfect because they seem to remember every page I've visited except the only one I actually need to return to. At least Firefox gives you a few more options for changing how it records your surfing history. With Internet Explorer, the only two options you get are to 1) change the number of days your history is stored and to 2) clear your history completely.
Tweaking Firefox's history settings
To adjust the history settings in Firefox, click Tools > Options > Privacy. Here, you can reset the number of days the browser remembers the sites you visit (the default is nine), or tell Firefox not to record the data you enter into forms and the search bar. You can also erase Firefox's memory of the files and programs you download. The default in both cases is to remember.
Reset the number of days Firefox remembers your browsing history via the Privacy Options dialog box.
(Credit: Mozilla Firefox)When you press Ctrl-Shift-Delete to clear Firefox's private data, you're shown seven options, five of which are selected. I usually just want to clear the cache--Gmail sometimes balks at downloading my in-box unless I clear out the browser's store of temporary files.
To change the defaults, reopen the Privacy Options, and click Settings in the Private Data section. Check the items you want to clear, uncheck those you don't, and click OK. The next time you open the Clear Private Data dialog box, your new defaults will be the only ones checked.
Customize the categories of private data that Firefox deletes by default when you click Clear Private Data.
(Credit: Mozilla Firefox)By default, Firefox shows up to 50 entries in each history folder. You can reduce Firefox's memory consumption (and possibly slow some page reloads) by reducing this entry via the browser's configuration options. Type about:config in the address bar, and press Enter. Scroll to and double-click browser.sessionhistory.max_entries, and enter the maximum number of pages you want Firefox to remember for each site you visit.
Internet Explorer's meager history options
When you click Tools > Delete Browsing History in Internet Explorer 7, you're given five options: Temporary Internet Files, Cookies, History, Form data, and Passwords. Or click "Delete all" to clear all five.
Internet Explorer 7's Delete Browsing History dialog box gives you five options.
(Credit: Microsoft)To change the number of days IE stores your browsing history, click Tools > Internet Options, click Settings under "Browsing history" on the General tab, and click the up or down arrows in the History section at the bottom of the resulting dialog box.
Change the number of days Internet Explorer 7 retains a list of the sites you've visited via the Browsing History Settings dialog box.
(Credit: Microsoft)Tomorrow: a Firefox add-on that shows all the files downloaded by the current page.
Mozilla's new project called Weave is an exciting new add-on to Mozilla's popular browser Firefox. While in its infancy, the service plans to be a way for users to save and access their personal browsing information across multiple machines. It's a little bit like Google's Web history, del.icio.us, and a Web password saver all wrapped up into one.
Some use cases for Weave (as listed by Mozilla) include: accessing your history and bookmarks from your home version of Firefox on your mobile Firefox browser, shared/collaborative bookmarking, and personalization tools to let you log in and sync up your home bookmarks, plug-ins and passwords on another machine; all things that are typically a pain unless you're technically proficient or know how to plan ahead.
Weave version 0.1, which Mozilla's Labs team rolled out a few weeks back, lays the foundation for Web developers to add Weave integration into their services. It's limited to some very basic back-end tools for developers, although version 0.2 which is planned for "early 2008" is adding a full-blown API, and a user interface complete with settings to let you control how much of your information Weave can access.
Currently, users who want to take advantage of the Weave plug-in must be running the latest beta of Firefox 3, Mozilla's upcoming follow-up to the current version 2.0, which you can grab here.
Have you ever wanted to browse a Web page you saw a few weeks ago, but gave up after spending too long sifting through your browser history? Maybe you found some information on a site about a particular subject you wanted to revisit, but numerous searches have turned up nothing. I discovered a program recently which helps with this very problem and also offers some other cool features that just about anyone might find useful. Unfortunately, the program is not without its problems.
Mousing over a page brings up an information window with all the specifics.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Browseback, from developers SmileOnMyMac, takes your Web history and organizes it visually with thumbnails, so you can see all the sites you've visited. The program organizes your history into three rows of 30 thumbnails each, stacked next to each other like a fanned-out deck of cards. Mousing over each thumbnail produces an effect much like Apple's Dock when you have magnification turned on--you get a slightly closer view of each page, making it a little easier to identify. Double-clicking on a thumbnail page brings the page up in your default browser (BrowseBack supports most of the popular Mac browsers) for viewing.
Clicking on a thumbnail brings up a menu of actions you can take with each Web page
(Credit: CNET Networks)The other features in BrowseBack revolve around what to do with these Web pages once you've found them. You can save Web pages to your hard drive to view later; e-mail an interesting Web page to a friend; print the Web page; or save the page as a PDF file. To complete any of these actions, you only need to click the thumbnail once to bring up a small menu, or simply right-click it with your mouse. One of the best features is the ability to search your entire archive by a specific keyword using the search box--very helpful for finding info about a specific subject across your browser's history.
Having a search box for keywords is especially handy when searching a large Web history
(Credit: CNET Networks)Clearly having this much flexibility would come in handy for Internet research, shopping on Web sites, or merely to find a site you can't quite remember, like I mentioned above. Unfortunately, while it is useful, BrowseBack has a couple of issues that may make it less than desirable.
One problem is the time it takes to archive your browser history. You are given the option to archive your entire history; beginning from a specific date; or between two dates that you specify. If you choose your entire history, it could take hours to archive all of those pages. Another problem is that even with only a little over 30 thumbnails, BrowseBack seemed sluggish on our test machine, but faster machines would probably have less problems.
Aside from the slow archiving and sluggishness on older machines, we have to wonder what the audience is for this type of application. It would be extremely useful for Web research, studying, and shopping like I mentioned above, but beyond that, it's my experience that I can find just about anything using regular browser (or Web-based) search features. Overall, BrowseBack is a great concept for those who need to sift through their history, but unless you have a specific need, I would wait a couple of versions until the developers streamline the process.
What do you think? Do you have need for this type of application? Is it too slow for you or just right? Let me know in the comments!
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