Cupertino (CA) – A new patent filed by Apple hints at user browser interface changes that could arrive with an upcoming version of the company’s Safari application. Apple aims to improve the common list view in a browsing history and suggests a graphical tree view that shows visited sites and their relationships

The filing published by the US Patent & Trademark Office today describes a new graphical view of the browsing history that could overcome the list view, which is more difficult to read as more sites are added to the history.

"A problem with this linear history is that users can visit a large number of web pages, which are confusing to view in a linear history, and the forward and back buttons are inefficient and cumbersome way to navigate through multiple web pages," Apple wrote. The company also noted that a linear browsing history is not only confined to web sites, because the list becomes populated with other data types, which increases the complexity of the list.

To solve this problem, Apple is apparently working on a browsing history feature that shows a tree view of visited sites with hierarchically ordered and connected nodes. The tree would be tied to a timeline, enabling users to get a sense of when particular relationship between visited sites occurred. Manually visited sites (those whose URL users manually entered in the address bar) would be displayed as root nodes and sites visited from root nodes would become child nodes connected with lines to signal relationship to each other and the parent node.

Since a typical browsing session would quickly result in a very complex tree, Apple proposes new controls that enable zooming in and out to any particular point in time. Using the controls, a user would be able to show, for example, only nodes associated with pages that have an address with a hierarchical level corresponding to the position of the depth slider.

"When the depth is set at zero compression, all nodes are displayed. When the depth is set at maximum compression, only nodes associated with an address at the first hierarchical level are displayed," the filing states.

History

Sep 25, 2008 16:01     

I hate history. Why do browser people think we need more history????
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Patent this

Sep 26, 2008 02:00     

A filter hiding sex-related and ad-related entries in browser history... it is enough to reduce by 95% the clutter in the list for most users (99% in case of young male users)!
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So obvious ...

Sep 26, 2008 03:45     

I had that same idea for years now and don't consider myself as a visionary. So anyone that got frustrated browsing complex sites could have the same idea. More than back history, the problem is forward history. You could have been browsing different links from the same page and only one forward path is stored. Would be better to be able to go back and forth to different pages. What I have to thank to Apple is to implement it at last.

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