abi | blog » The past doesn’t end here

December 26th, 2009
by Abi Raja

The past doesn’t end here

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∞

So, Chrome has a pretty neat New Tab page where it shows recently closed tabs and windows (click image below to enlarge it). But guess what happens when you click the “View Full History” link? It doesn’t show you what you’d expect―the full list of closed tabs and windows. Instead, it shows you your standard history of pages.

One of the rules of good interface design should be store as much user data as possible. User input is sacred. Infinite undo history is good. All data matters. There’s no reason to throw anything away. Saving the full history of tabs doesn’t cost anything but it creates a lot of value. So, do it.

~ Voices ~

December 26th, 2009
by Peter Kasting

Actually, storing the state of the tabs costs quite a bit. Remember, you’re not just storing a URL; you’re storing the complete state of the tab so you can restore it as the user left it. This adds up fast. We keep more than you see on the new tab page–the last 10 close actions–but beyond that, diminishing returns kicks in.

I’d love to see us store, say, the last 100 closed items, but the cost is prohibitive.
December 26th, 2009
by Abi Raja
The Author

If I’m not wrong, Chrome already stores the full text of each page (I know this because when I search in the location bar or on the history page, it shows me results with the keyword in the content of the page; tangent: if I recall correctly, page titles are for some reason not weighted higher than in-page matches) so I’m not sure how storing the complete state of the tab could be higher than that (I mean, the state of a tab is simply the tab opener/parent tab + a list of history items, isn’t it?).

But I did confound two different things in the post – saving user data and the fact that the label on the Recently Closed section is still wrong. The latter is definitely something you should fix.
December 27th, 2009
by Colby Russell

So, Firefox has a pretty neat bookmarks organizer where it shows bookmarks sortable by various criteria. But guess what happens when you click the “All Bookmarks” item? It doesn’t show what you’d expect―the full list of your filed, unfiled, tagged, and untagged bookmarks. Instead, it shows the bookmarks toolbar, the menubar, and “unsorted bookmarks” items.
December 27th, 2009
by Colby Russell

PS: That’s bug 528304.
December 29th, 2009
by Peter Kasting

“if I recall correctly, page titles are for some reason not weighted higher than in-page matches”

You do not recall correctly. (I wrote this code, so I’m certain.)

Neither is weighted as highly as a URL prefix match, though.

“the state of a tab is simply the tab opener/parent tab + a list of history items, isn’t it?”

No, the state of a tab involves the serialized DOM, JS virtual machine state, etc. Right now we don’t remember everything because for things like GMail that could mean hundreds of megabytes of data, but we still remember a lot.

“the label on the Recently Closed section is still wrong”

While I take your meaning, it’s not so obviously wrong, with an obviously better alternative, as you might think. Your history of visited pages is the same as your history of closed pages (modulo anything currently open), but sorted in a different order. Once you’ve gone past a dozen or so closed pages, listing things in visit order rather than close order is probably more intuitive. So I think what we’re doing is actually OK.

I think it might be slightly better to add a divider between the last closed item and the history link, or give it a different background color, or make it a button.

FWIW, your post is the first complaint I’ve ever heard about it :)
January 12th, 2010
by Abi Raja
The Author

Colby, thanks for the note. Did not realize that.

Peter, I think I wrote the wrong observation. What I observed was that non-prefix URL matches are for some reason not ranked higher then in-page matches. Is that true? For example, I often search for “reader” to find “http://google.com/reader” but that doesn’t work well on Chrome but it does in Firefox. I think non-prefix URL matches are pretty important.

Well, just storing the history of each tab (with opener) would be useful in this case and that alone shouldn’t take up too much space.

“…listing things in visit order rather than close order is probably more intuitive.” I highly doubt this although a hybrid might be the best we can achieve here. Right now, there’s no information at all about tabs in history. I do agree that this isn’t a major issue (that’s what I’ve been saying all along! It isn’t major but I was still worth noting the mistake).
January 12th, 2010
by Peter Kasting

Let me see if I am correctly understanding your question. You are asking if it is true that, for the input “foo”, and two identically-visited URLs, where one matches in the URL (”http://sample.com/foo/…”) and the other matches in the page body text, Chrome will give them equal weighting in the address bar drop down?

If so, then yes, that is currently true. Both the URL and the fulltext are fed to the fulltext repository, which is the source of the matches in these cases.

It would be possible to rewrite this to weight URL matches more highly. In general non-prefix URL matching is not a case we have focused much on, partly because much of the design of the omnibox backend happened before the existence of the “Awesomebar” and its popularization of this style of matching, and partly because it’s a bit tricky to do this well and still preserve the sorts of invariants around synchronous results that we need to have for inline autocomplete to work. As a result, addressing this is nebulous and shuffled far behind other, pressing issues on my plate. Patches welcome :)
January 12th, 2010
by Abi Raja
The Author

Yep, that was my question. And my point is that assigning equal weighting to both is a bad idea. Clearly, “reader” in a subsection of a page doesn’t mean anything to the user’s memory compared with “reader” in the URL. Although I don’t think the only reason such matching is useful is because people are habituated to the Awesomebar, I can understand why it might be difficult to do this well. Thanks!
January 13th, 2010
by Peter Kasting

It’s not really “clear” that the page content is less memorable than the URL. If I read a story on the New York Times, it’s likely that I never even paid attention to the URL, whereas the page content is much more memorable.

Part of the reason (though not all) for the omnibox design is that the majority of users neither understand nor care about URLs. They don’t distinguish them from searches, they don’t do a lot of typing them in; they visit their sports or news or whatever sites and click links, they open emails sent by their friends, they search and then click search result links. Instead of elevating the ranking of URL matches, it would be better to elevate the ranking of “important” pages. Frequency and recency can both be signals of page importance, but there are dozens of others, such as time spent on page, the quantity of unique content, and the relevance of the search term to the page (either through dumb arithmetic like “how many times does this appear” or sophisticated content analysis done by server-side algorithms).
January 30th, 2010
by Abi Raja
The Author

I think you need some way to figure out the importance of words within a page then. I experimented with using Open Calais[1] once to try to figure out what the most important words on a page were and the results weren’t too bad. So, that could be one approach.

[1] http://abcdefu.wordpress.com/2009/01/26/heres-to-the-lazy-ones-lazybar/

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This is the Footer

You are about to begin reading the footer on Abi's blog. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the other windows; music is probably playing on your iTunes. ⌘+tab to it and pause the song right away. Maybe, your iTunes just froze up and won't listen to you. Hit ctrl+alt+delete and bang it repeatedly until the music dies out. Or if you prefer, just stay in this window and hope the music and the Gmail Notifier and the yellow popups emanating from the lower right corner will just leave you alone.

Now, try to foresee everything else that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.

It's not that you expect anything in particular from this particular footer. You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from Presidents, from websites, from journeys, from marriages, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs. What about footers? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of footers, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.

So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of this footer. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don't recognize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as an asshole who doesn't know how to write, and who instead, chooses to flagrantly plagiarize Italo Calvino's first chapter from If on a winter's night a traveller. Now that you know that this piece of writing is a fake, a copy, a work of a criminal even, you are bitterly disappointed. For a second there, you thought this author was actually creative! And just for a millisecond, you thought about following him on Twitter. But that's impossible now because you only follow the most brilliant people and the author here seems to be quite the opposite.

You even wonder why you are still reading the footer of such a talentless hack? And the answer to that is obvious — you are not a quitter. Once you start on something, you don't stop until you achieve complete success. When Ronald Reagan could not run in 1988 due to term limits, you petitioned to get rid of term limits altogether. And when the courts threw out that petition, you called your congressman. You called him everyday for the first twelve years and you've been calling her for the last nine. And on November 4 2008, you wrote in Ronald Reagan's name just like you've done every election since '88. When your math teacher give you a D in 7th grade, you didn't sleep until the next year after getting an A. You are one of the 40% of Twitter users who returned after the first month. You are Donald Trump. You are Greg Kinnear's character in Little Miss Sunshine (which you hate to find out, is one of the author's favorite movies). In short, you never quit, and for this deeply-seated reason, you will continue reading this footer regardless of how long, boring or fake it is or becomes.

Your mind wanders once again to this plagiarizing rat of an author. What can this guy do? He can't design (obviously, someone else designed this blog), he can't write, he most probably can't read. Can he code? Ah! Maybe, he can. Maybe, that's the only thing he can do! You almost click this link to his projects page. But you stop yourself midway, what if that page has another long boring essay and you, being the non-quitter that you are, would have to read every word of that too. So, you don't bother with even going near the link to his about page. Yes, it's best not to start.

Now, you are seething with anger. You have read 752 words of the author's writing (or rather, of Calvino's writing) and he's done all the talking. You'd like to talk back, scream at the author, because you are the kind of guy who calls up Jim Skinner when your local McDonald's refuses to serve you breakfast at 10:59am. So, you start composing an email but immediately after you write the words “To the bastard who ripped off everyone..”, all the energy seems to get sucked out of your body. You put down your pen, so to speak. You give up! Perhaps for the first time in your life. Fuck. You are really really really really really really pissed off. You wish you could reach into the computer and grab the neck of the author. But, with a heavy sigh, you give up, yet again. All is lost. You are doomed to read this footer for as long as it runs.

And as you wallow in your own misery, unbeknownst to you, your computer's security has been compromised. Your hard disk's contents have been copied and the disk subsequently erased. Your porn has been sent to your grandmother, the one that's still living. And at this very moment, your credit card is being used to purchase Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller, which Amazon will deliver to the author within 24 hours, who will read it for the very first time. “Wait, how's that even....

Your world spins madly, everything is grey and blurred. Your jaw drops. You are shocked. Stunned, in fact. But, before you can regain your poise and try to comprehend what just happened, and before the author can tell you more about how he hacked your computer, you are already at the end of t h i s

abi writes here

The past doesn’t end here

~ Voices ~

~ Add your voice ~

This is the Footer