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=== Introduction === | === Introduction === | ||
The places history system is a redesign of the Firefox global history system | |||
using the new sqlite-based mozStorage APIs. This system provides additional | |||
performance, flexibility, and querying capabilities. Questions about the | |||
history re-write can be sent to brettw<AT>gmail<DOT>com. | |||
See also: | |||
* [[Places]] | |||
* [[Annotations]] | |||
* [[Firefox:2.0_Bookmarks]] | |||
[[ | === Places history features === | ||
The major places history views will be queries over places visited by time. The | |||
user will be able to select any date range and see when they visited each page. | |||
Actually showing which pages were visited during a given time period means we | |||
will have to store every time the user visits any page, rather than just the | |||
last visit time. This fixes some problems with the old history system where | |||
items would move around if you visited them again. | |||
These view should be as organized and as concise as possible. The old history | |||
system includes many redirect pages in the view, and doesn't have things like | |||
favicons and good grouping that might make it easier to locate pages of | |||
interest. As a result, favicons for every page will be stored for viewing in | |||
history, and we will provide better domain-style grouping and a calendar for | |||
picking days rather than a tree view. | |||
The second most user-visible history feature will be keyword searching. This | |||
will be essentially unchanged from the old system, which is too bad because the | |||
current system sucks. Because there is no word index, we do a brute-force | |||
search over all titles for the keyword in question. While sometimes useful, | |||
this is not always what you want, resulting in a number of third-party history | |||
indexing products. Long term, it would be nice to index pages you visit. For | |||
the coming release it might be nice to provide a hook for third-party products | |||
so they can provide text searching capabilities to the places system. | |||
The last major change will be the ability to define complex queries over the | |||
history and bookmark systems. Most users will not be generating such queries, | |||
but they can be used to provide a variety of nice features. For example, a | |||
query folder can be created for "My favorite pages" which contains the 20 most | |||
frequently visited URLs in history. A query for the most frequently visited | |||
pages that are not bookmarked provides a good candidate list for suggesting | |||
boomarks. | |||
=== Example === | |||
This screenshot shows some of these ideas: | |||
http://maxradi.us/post/moz_wiki/history_grouping.png | |||
All pages have favicons for better visual differentiation and grouping. Pages | |||
are arraged into "sessions" consisting of followed links. Typing a new URL or | |||
following a bookmark gives you a new "session" which appears as a dotted line | |||
in this image. This is an actual screenshot, but the ugly redirect pages have | |||
been manually removed. Proper tracking of redirect pages is pending, see | |||
[[Browser_History:Redirects]]. | |||
=== New capabilities === | === New capabilities === | ||