Firefox extensions to improve history tools

We visit and revisit web pages. You will find that more than 60% of your web visits are actually revisits of some sort. But web browsers support for such revisitations is limited to bookmarks, history list, URL auto-completion and back button. Here are a few history tools which can greatly improve your experience during web browsing.

  • Tab History: It is the simplest yet very useful extension. Usually when we open a link in a new tab, the back button history for the new tab is empty. This extensions adds the session history from the parent tab to this new tab, so that you are not lost with the question “where do i come from?”.
  • Tree Style Tab: This extension arranges your tabs in a tree structure, like a folder tree of Windows explorer. So whenever you open a new tab from a link, this tab is added as ‘child’ node in the tab tree of the parent node.
    Tree style tab

    Tree style tab

    You can conveniently arrange these tabs in the tree using the simple drap and drop feature. You can go through  an extensive list of features on the official site. One thing I would like to mention is that if you close a tab, its children are orphaned. As the father is gone, no way children would know about their grandparents ;).

  • History Tree: History tree visualizes your history as a tree of tabs with thumbnails of web pages which makes it pretty easier for you to recognize what you are looking for. It is a very easy to use extension and provides four different visualizations for your history. It also shows the part of the history which is lost by back and forward buttons due to their LIFO implementation. For example, if you visit <A>, <B>, <C>, <D>, <BACK to D>, <BACK to C> , E. This sequence will loose <C> and <D> from the back button’s history but History tree will not. 🙂

    History Tree

    History Tree

  • Infoaxe: Infoaxe belongs to a family of history tools which provide a lot of cool features but ask you to register on their website so your history can be uploaded and processed on their servers. With Infoaxe, you can browse through all of your history in your browser or online. It also supports IE, so it doesn’t matter if you were browsing a page on which computer or browser, it will all be recorded by Infoaxe and made available to you “exactly when you need it”. It supports full text search on the web pages you browse and not just titles or keywords like your history list, which makes it pretty impressive.
    It provides a Google widget which adds result for your queries on Google search results page (SERP) with results from your local history. Read more about it here: http://infoaxe.wordpress.com/2008/12/23/the-infoaxe-vs-google-challenge-be-lazy-while-searching/

    Infoaxe Google widget

    Infoaxe Google Widget

  • Hooeey: Hooeey is quite similar to Infoaxe in the way that it is also an online web browser history management tool. But it gives you full control over what part of your history is uploaded to their servers. I also like the analytics they provide about my browsing behavior.

There are several more to explore like Thumbstribs which provide a filmstrip from your browsing history or Webmynd which provides integration with Twitter, Wikipedia, Youtube and provides top results from these websites whenever you search with Google. But I leave them up to you to find out and report.

4 thoughts on “Firefox extensions to improve history tools

  1. Pingback: Infoaxe user blog posts. We love that you love us :) « Infoaxe's Blog

  2. Alena Markus

    The new improvement of Mozilla Firefox will surely provide great benefits to all people who will be using it. This will even give them something that they can use with their daily work.

    Reply

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