If you surf as much as I do, you know how quickly your browser history can fill up with endless lists of URLs. Trying to find a site you surfed three days ago when you can’t remember the exact name, or finding a specific page within a site after you’ve hunted through numerous pages to get to the good stuff, can be a frustrating time sink. Browseback, from SmileOnMyMac, lets you scan your history visually, displaying a thumbnail of every page. Can’t remember the name of the site, but know that the background was red? Scan the thumbnails with your mouse until your eyes see red.
Browseback saves the contents of every page as a PDF. Launch Browseback and it appears as an overlay on your desktop, thumbnails of previously visited pages appearing in rows like a fanned out deck of playing cards. Move your cursor over the rows and an overlay displays the title of the page, URL, summary, and date you last accessed the page. Clicking on a thumbnail reveals a menu with several options, allowing you to open the page in your browser or email, view, print, or save a PDF of the page. You can also quickly search your history by keyword.
Browseback imports your existing history the first time you launch it (you can set a limit on how much history to import) and as long as Browseback is running it will continue to save your history as you browse. Preferences allow you to limit the disk space Browseback can use, as well as how long to keep pages. Note that the PDF files can add up quickly; when I first imported my history, 847 items—about a week’s worth—occupied 119.1 MB of disk space. But Browseback lets you block specified URLs so your history isn’t cluttered with sites you’re unlikely to want to retreive (such as web-based email accounts or blogging software).
Browseback supports Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Netscape, OmniWeb, Camino, and Opera. Like all SmileOnMyMac applications, Browseback is Intel-Ready.
Browseback is $29.95, but you can use it in demo mode, which displays a demo message in your web browser.
Bottom Line: Browseback lets you scan your history visually. It can make the haystack smaller and the needle bigger and brighter.
From: SmileOnMyMac
Price: $29.95
Platform: Macintosh
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One Response to “Browseback: Scan Your Browser History Visually”
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March 21st, 2006 at 10:46 am
is there e better and cheaper solution for visualizing the browser history.
in my eyes, this app sucks and it’s far too expensive… this is mainly because i don’t understand the reason of having 3 lines with pages, the need to page through the history without any feedback on where in the whole history you are at the moment and that the pages are not constantly visible (problems when reaching the left ore the right end (have a look at the doc for the solution of this problem))
but indead the idea is good and i’m lacking of a solution to this problem.