March 2014

Now available on the Chrome Web Store!

histree is a Google Chrome Extension that I have been working on as a side project for the past couple months. It is designed as a replacement for the menu that pops up when you long press the back button. The main idea behind it is that the conventional back button menu only displays the most recent branch of the tree of pages that you have visited during your browsing session, whereas histree will display all the branches.

To get a better idea of what I’m talking about, lets look at an example. Lets suppose you are looking for a new bike on craigslist, so you bring up the bicycles page of craigslist and start looking through the listings. At this point your back button menu will look like:

Which is about the same as your histree (except for the page thumbnails that histree displays):

Now let’s suppose you start clicking through the results, looking at different bike listings. After going through five of the listings, you may want to go back and revisit one of them. Unfortunetly, your back button menu isn’t going to be of any help:

But meanwhile, your histree has been working hard, keeping track of all the different branches that have started to grow off of your original histree:

So now if you want to go back to any of those listing you visited in the past, they are right there in your histree! Histree even supports nested branches, so if for example you were to start searching for an iPhone on craigslist, you would still have your old bike search branch stored as a nested branch under your iPhone branch:

You’ll notice that as your histree gets more complex, it starts to get a little harder to decipher its different branches. Luckily, you can always just follow the green line that shows up when you highlight a link to find what branch a given page is a part of.