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Mouseless web navigation7/31/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The idea of visualizing a user’s journey through the web as a trail is by no means a new one. Optionally opening pages in a new trail.Allowing annotation of trails so users can record their thoughts while researching a topic.Persisting trails in a form as they were during the visit, so that they can be revisited (offline).Fading trails as they become irrelevant and eventually moving them off the grid.Sharing not just URLs but entire trails.This provides us with opportunities to explore further enhancements to the user experience. And yet each navigation trail is a tab that tells a complete story from start to finish. Users can continue using browsers as they always have. This is intentional: our goal is to enhance existing user experiences, not to replace them. If you ignore the paths leading up to each explored topic, trails are no different from conventional tabs. This is what Nala would have actually seen: Tabs and trails: the same, but different. Luckily, that can be removed by focusing on a single trail while folding the others. On the other hand, duplicates lead to a lot of distracting visual noise. The benefit is that a trail tells a self-contained story from left to right. So that’s what we display to the user (Version 3):Įach row represents a trail from the root of the navigation tree to a result. ![]() What we think matters most is not where each exploration diverged, but the complete path leading to a result. With Browser.html we are prototyping a user interface that tells not just the fragments of Nala’s history that a tabbed browser preserves (Version 1), but all of it (Version 2):īut these trees can easily get intricate. Of course, browsers typically provide tools like history views and “recent tabs” menus, but none of these presents a narrative that matches the actual course Nala followed. In this example of a common search scenario, more than a third of the history is lost! To look at the results of her initial search results again, Nala goes back a few steps in the history of the first tab and opens another pizza venue directly from there (10). Now when she selects a new restaurant (8), part of the current tab’s navigation history is lost as well:Ĭlicking an external link to the next restaurant’s website again opens a new tab (9), and again severs the connection from the history that preceded it. The browser’s amnesia compounds as she goes to look at more options: switching back to the first tab (6) and navigating back to the Yelp results (7), she looks for another restaurant. All history about how Nala got to the restaurant’s website is lost! The new tab doesn’t have any history, or any connection to the first tab. She follows a link to a list of restaurants on Yelp (3), and checks out a promising pizza joint (4).Įxternal links on Yelp open in separate tabs, so when Nala clicks a link to a restaurant’s website, it starts a new tab (5). In her traditional, tabbed browser, she sets off with a search (1) that takes her to a page of search results (2). To illustrate the kind of scenario we’re thinking about, we’ll introduce you to our friend Nala. Our hope is that our work might help advance the state of browsing closer to the ideal of a tool that enhances our cognitive process, rather than increasing our cognitive load. The goal of trails is to construct not only a window into web content but a narrative of user activity. With Browser.html, a Mozilla Research project aimed at building a browser user interface built in HTML for nightly builds of Servo, we are experimenting with evolving the standard tabbed browser towards a model based on trails. Since the early 2000’s, the desktop metaphor of tabbed browsing has dominated the way we navigate the web. By Patryk Adaś Lossless Web Navigation with Trails ![]()
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