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June 1, 2005
Thumbnail Session History
Using Robert's offscreen rendering patches, I was able to put together a demo for XTech2005. Unfortunately the internet connectivity at the conference was not working well enough for me to be able to actually run the demo live, but here's a screenshot - a thumbnail session history above the browser that provides a visual representation of what's in the back/forward button menus. This idea is based on Bret Lider's Backslider concept.
Posted by ben at June 1, 2005 12:06 PM
Comments
I mocked up a history menu view that could compliment your design:
http://blog.wilsonet.com/archives/2004/08/09/sight-history/
Posted by: Daniel J. Wilson at June 1, 2005 12:19 PM
Utilizing SVG, though perhaps it would be possible using other technologies, I imagine a nice slider lens (or something to that effect) could be implimented that would make it quite usable and sharp/snazzy looking.
Posted by: Mark at June 1, 2005 1:08 PM
Will the ability to create a thumbnail of a page be available to extensions?
Posted by: David at June 1, 2005 2:10 PM
Is this part of the plan for the revised history & bookmarks for 1.5/2.0?
Posted by: David Naylor at June 1, 2005 3:11 PM
This could be offered as a very nice extension and activated with a keybinding. :-)
I would imagine it wouldn't perform that well, though, especially with complicated websites.
Posted by: Foxtrot at June 1, 2005 3:28 PM
Ben, and hopes we'll see the code you did?
I and I'm sure others, would be interested in creating an extension based on it.
Posted by: Jed at June 1, 2005 4:24 PM
I'll post the code later, it's on a hacked up tree on my laptop (I had to modify Robert's patches a little in order to hack together the demo quickly).
Posted by: Ben at June 1, 2005 4:43 PM
David: yes! It's available to extensions starting from Deer Park Alpha 1.
Posted by: Robert O'Callahan at June 2, 2005 1:06 AM
It will be really a new "IE killer" extension ... as tab browsing and integrated search was before
Posted by: jimich at June 2, 2005 1:35 AM
It would also be really useful to be able to hover over a tab and see a thumbnail of the page open in the tab.
Posted by: jgraham at June 2, 2005 2:34 AM
jimich: AOL browser does that. I also think that it'd be cool to have in FF.
Posted by: Mark at June 2, 2005 10:17 AM
This is a *great* idea Ben, I look forward to seeing it in Firefox, but it's not exactly a "new" idea either. (OTOH, these references would hopefully preclude MS from patenting a "graphical thumbnail browser history", seeing as the first reference was from 1998.)
http://www.otal.umd.edu/SHORE98/bs01/Introduction.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Irider_screenshot_optimized.jpg
Btw, if this is soon to be an inherent capability of the browser, to render a page to an image and then display it, possibly in a scaled manner - does that mean that full-screen zoom, and other such Opera-like features, are not far away either? The example sure does look pretty slick. :)
Posted by: Virtual Larry at June 3, 2005 2:23 AM
Ben what would be really cool would be to implement these thumbnails as type elements, so that any link - in HTML or chrome can show these as tooltip popups. It would be neat as these popups could then be contextual for a:visited links on the actual page.
Posted by: Neil Stansbury at June 5, 2005 4:52 PM
This could be offered as a very nice extension and activated with a keybinding. :-)
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Posted by: musokili at June 7, 2005 3:51 PM
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