The way history is always implemented is also not helpful.

Say you browse sites A B C D E, then later you go back and browse D, then B.

History seems to be recorded as A C E D B

But recording A B C D E D B might be more cluttered, but more helpful as well. It shows you the decisions you made to browse from one thing to another.

This compaction method also seems to happen across days, destroying the list of everything you browsed on tuesday in order.

> Say you browse sites A B C D E, then later you go back and browse D, then B.

> But recording A B C D E D B might be more cluttered, but more helpful as well. It shows you the decisions you made to browse from one thing to another.

That's personally why I have been using Tree Style Tab (for about a decade now)

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

• https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab

Firefox's implementation of this annoys me. If I'm trying to find a page I was on before, I sort history by date (obviously) and go back to around the time I was on it to start clicking.

...which drags the website I clicked on to the top of my history, changing its temporal position and making me have to find the time period I was looking at before, which now looks textually different.

There's no reason why there couldn't be multiple views of your history, if it's recorded with fidelity. The list of page views by time is often too noisy depending on what you are looking for, and the compacted view might be more useful. As you rightly point out, sometimes that page view log is what you want.

Really, the biggest use-case for browser history in its current form, seems to be to get people in trouble when nosy family members go peeking at it.

Completely agree. I don’t really understand the motivation for this behavior—surely they are not trying conserve disk space? I’d really like the history to just be like a log file. Even better if I could search within a specified time window.

Chrome shows the history as ABCDEDB. Just searches within time frames aren't possible.

I find the history in Firefox much less useful, one of the few areas I find Chrome superior.

But chrome deletes your old history.

> History seems to be recorded as A C E D B

I'd expect it to be recorded as A B C D B - if it's recorded like you wrote, it becomes completely illogical. I think I'd prefer your A B C D E D B.

I remember an old IE based browser that represented history as nested side bar tabs.

The trouble with tribbles is that they're born pregnant, and can't stop reproducing.

Kind of like tabs and bookmarks.

It sounds like a close-to-correct metaphor is a list of tabs associated with temporary bookmarks per tab (sorted in order first opened in the tab). That is, when you visit a new page, by default your current page does not get added to the list of bookmarks, but from the right-click menu/middle click you can choose to have your current page added to the list.

Do you mean automatic sessions? Say, group by activity time cluster and fold them, perhaps even close if disused enough?

Speaking of sessions, none of the available OS supports this metaphor well, and the closest are Linux desktops, while still being not even close.