Web Browser Usability

Jacob Nielson writes about usability in his "alertbox" forum, usually talking about website usability. In a recent posting he describes some ideas he has for making web browsers more usable by extending HTML to a more complete hypertext. (Go read his description for more details.)

I think that there is plenty of room for improvement just looking at the browser side of the web. If you don't have to change HTML it's a lot easier for people to adopt the changes gradually.

• Bookmarks that act like bookmarks. When I use a web browser, the bookmarks that it stores work like a page reference written in a notebook. When I read a book or a magazine the bookmarks that I use keep track of where I've read to in the book. I want the "how far have I read" or "where did I leave off" kind of functionality in a web browser. Since the term "bookmark" is already taken, I'll propose calling these "resume points." If I open a "resume point," browse a little bit, and then close the window, the next time I open that point I want to be taken right to where I left off, with the ability to go back through my history and everything.


• A "Next Link" button. Opera has a nice "Fast Forward" button that I use pretty regularly. Next to the "back" button it is probably the one I use the most. However, there are a lot of cases where it is not quite what I'm really wanting. My most common browsing task is probably to do a Google search and then want to page through the list of resulting links. I want a button that is the equivalent of going back, finding the link that I last clicked on from that page, and then clicking on the next link on that page. This would let me browse through the Google results with single clicks. It would also work well for a lot of shopping sites (like Amazon) which return lists of things.


• A map of the web. Years ago, before Windows became moderately usable for simple computing tasks, IBM made an operating system for PCs called OS/2. It's been dead for a while, but it had the first graphical web browser that I used, called "Web Explorer". It had a neat history view which showed a graph of the pages traversed with the various links between them. It only showed the links that you'd actually taken, but I'd like something like it which analyzed all the links on the pages and could show various levels of detail. Working in tandem with "Agressive look-ahead" (described below) it could produce an interactive map of a website to help me find what I'm looking for.


• Stronger history searches. Most web browsers keep track of recently viewed pages, calling it my "history". Most web browsers will allow me to search through history, looking for keywords. Yet the search that they perform is often just searching for keywords in the page title and URL! Microsoft's Internet Explorer seems to try a little harder than the others, but still falls far short of really letting me find whatever I'm looking for on any page I've ever been to. I've got a nice, big hard drive. Why should I ever lose my browsing history?


• Spam filter integration. Yes, spam is the universal annoyance. And spam filtering does seem to help somewhat. But occasionally I do want to get mail sent to me from a company or something. My web browser knows which domains I've given my email address to, that should be a clue to my spam filter that mail from that domain is ok. Maybe even a little popup would be nice. Ideally, the web browser could look for words from the page and site that I gave my email address to and feed them as non-spam words for use in our now nearly ubiquitous Baysean email filter. Anyhow the punchline here is: The web browser knows that I gave out my email address. That should somehow be enough to get the response back through my spam filter, but often isn't. That is inefficient.


• Aggressive look-ahead. I'm not really sure how feasable this is in a world of dynamic web pages, but it sure seems like with a fast internet connection and a big hard drive there's no really good reason why I couldn't have my browser download every page linked to from the page I'm looking at. Load times would get a lot shorter, if it was just a simple fetch from the cache. But there could be other benefits, as well. If I hover over a link, the browser could show me the target page, maybe reduced 50% in a popup window. It could feed the links from the other pages into my map of the web. When I do a "History search" it could include pages that were near the ones I actually went to, and maybe return those results in a different color, or separate list. Not having to wait for the content to download is really a small benefit in my way of thinking. Just having more data local to be able to make decisions with is really the big benefit.