Features for replaying browsing history timeline

[montemartin]

One capability I've always wished browser history could help with is recall of HOW and WHY I decided to visit a specific page. What was I thinking about at the time? What other pages did I visit before/after?

Since most visits stem from a link on another site my dream seems possible by tracking just a few additional data points in Hister for each visit.

• The date/time of each visit
• The previous/referring page (or app for external links)
• The next page visited (if you clicked links in the page)

Creating ways to navigate that data would add complexity so it's worth discussing; I'll list a couple ideas to kick it off. I'd love to know whether these are of interest to others before worrying about whether implementing them is actually practical. (If anyone knows of other projects to do what I'm suggesting I'd love to hear about them!)

UI Ideas
One obvious answer is repeating each entry in the /history view at the time of each visit. Another is listing the dates each page was visited in the previewer.

My larger idea is a "path view" showing the path that lead to a page on a specific visit. It would show a few pages leading up to the visit, and how you left the page on that visit (closed, clicked link). This would need to span longer times to solve the challenge of clicking links in tabs left open for 3 days.