Internet Explorer’s history is useless.
The history pane in Internet Explorer 5 and 6 tries to be intelligent and user-friendly, but in practice it seems almost completely useless.
Consider this scenario: You surf the web and follow a lot of random links. The next day, you try to find a specific page again.
I do not believe this is an uncommon task. How can you accomplish this in IE? IE’s history has a “View » By Date” option, where it separates history items by day or by week. Unfortunately, within each day, items are sorted alphabetically by site. This is counter-productive; if users remembered the address of the site, why would they need to look for it in the history pane?
(IE also has a “View » By Order Visited Today” option, where it lists each page you’ve visited during the past day in chronological order. Unfortunately, when Microsoft says “today”, they really mean today, not the past 24 hours. IE is not friendly to late-night web surfers; once the clock on your PC rolls past midnight, say goodbye to history items from 11:59 PM; you now have to remember the site address if you want to find them again. Oh, and if it just turned Monday, your history items from Sunday are now lost amidst all other items from “Last Week”.)
The only alternatives are to try to retrace the original steps or to try to find it with a search engine, both tedious chores.
Why should a seemingly simple task be so incredibly hard?
Netscape/Mozilla have done it right for ages. They allow you to view all history items in a single, flat list. Superficially, it might not appear to be as organized as IE’s hierarchical history pane, but it’s infinitely more useful, and it’s simpler too.
Unfortunately, years of using IE have weaned me away from using browsers’ valuable history features. Ugh.
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Have you heard people complain that it’s silly to have a dictionary in alphabetical order, because if you could spell the word, why would you be looking it up in the dictionary? (of course, I look things up for pronunciation — like “idyll”). I suppose history is the kind of thing people like chronologically, though.
— karen @ March 23, 2004, 7:26 am (PT)
Traditional dictionaries serve other purposes: to define terms and to provide pronunciations.
It’d be hard for a physical dictionary to provide different sort keys suitable for each task. Since words often have multiple pronunciations (and people often mispronounce words too), it’s much easier for a dictionary to sort everything canonically by spelling.
If you don’t know how to spell something, then yes, being able to search by pronunciation makes the most sense. (I wouldn’t be surprised if there are specialized dictionaries that do exactly that.) These days, though, spell-checkers and online dictionaries provide similar functionality. (That raises the question: do traditional dictionaries—which require you to know how to spell the word first—encourage better spelling? Do spell-checkers and online dictionaries promote laziness and poor spelling habits?)
Internet Explorer’s history pane is not a physical representation of data, however, so IE has no excuse. It’s free to provide multiple methods of sorting history items, yet all of its methods are unusable for chronological backtracking.
— James @ March 23, 2004, 1:38 pm (PT)
I think grouping by website is still pretty useful as long as date is used as a primary sort. In my history, there are often hundreds of links that I’ve followed in that day. It would a lot easier to go through the history if the items were chunked by website since knowing the website it came from should help you scan the list. Many items in a history are from the same site and it is often the case that the HTML page titles are absolutely useless.
I’m not saying that IE’s history is any good. I’d prefer flat date sorting to what they have now, but you could certainly improve Netscape/Mozilla’s history by grouping sequential visits to webpages.
This however, would not be too useful if you visited many outbound links from a website while still using that website as the center of your session. My typical Slashdot reading sessions are like this.
— Jeff Wong @ April 4, 2004, 3:57 am (PT)