Designing an Integrated Bookmark / History System for Web Browsing
Shaun Kaasten, Saul Greenberg · 2000
Current commercial web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer attempt to make it easier for users to return to previously visited web pages. They offer several important facilities for doing this, with the major ones being the Back button, the history list, and bookmarks. In theory, these mechanisms should be heavily used, for almost 60 % of all pages a person visits are to ones that they had seen previously [Tauscher and Greenberg 1997]. Yet research indicates several problems with these mechanisms. While Back is heavily used, people have an incorrect model of how it works, which leads to surprises when just-visited pages are no longer reachable [Cockburn and Jones 96; Greenberg and Cockburn 99]. Also, the bookmark and history systems are not used very frequently [Tauscher and Greenberg 97; Abrahms, Baeker, Chignell 98]. We believe that one of the reasons for these problems is that browsers provide revisitation systems in a fragmented, un-integrated manner. Back, history and bookmarks all use dissimilar underlying models, different interfaces, and various ways of sorting and presenting groups of candidate pages. In this research, our goal is to integrate the idea of Back, history and bookmarks into a single integrated revisitation system that captures the best features while remedying their known deficiencies. We are currently developing our prototype system (see Figure) that works within Microsoft Internet