Web Navigation - Yet Another Tree

It's always interesting to look at the way in which people overcome the problem of navigating the web. The problem being that nowdays content is full of sidelines and links. As you're reading your favourite blog (mine, surely ;)) they might link to another post, such as this one about The Problem With Tabbed Interfaces. From there you might be intreaged by Cyrus Najmabadi's post. And from there Tabbrowser extension. Before long you've got a long list of things to read. Even before you're finished with Jeff's post there are 10 possible other interesting pages to read, and that's excluding the comments. Reach into each of these and there are hundreds of possible fasinating webpages.

If you're anything like Jeff that means you will have one or two browser windows with hundreds of tabs (despite this coming up a few times in his blog I annoyingly can't find any references to it now). If you're anything like me that means you'll have five or six browser windows with six or seven tabs each as I split things up into logical chunks. Maintaining and navigating this hodgepot of links is a difficult task.

This is because navigation is a tree, but most browsers like to make you think it's a list. A list is easy enough for people to understand. With under 10 items it's easy enough to maintain. The trouble is it just doesn't scale.

Back to Jeff's post - here's what links one may visit organised firstly as a tree in which you can easily understand what links to what, giving you the context of how it relates to other content.

The Problem With Tabbed Interfaces

  - I hate tabs in web browsers

    - Tabextension3

      - Outsider FAQ

    - iRider

      - iRider Download

  - Make Vista's Alt+Tab Thumbnail Bigger

  - Where's Waldo?

    - Where's Waldo (TV Series)

      - HIT Entertainment

        - Thomas and Friends

          - Anthropomorthism

            - Cosmological Argument

Obviously once you get to Wikipedia there's no end of interesting things. And from every website on the internet you will almost always get to Wikipedia. And then never leave.

The cosmological argument, via Where's Waldo, is bizaarly removed from the problems with tabbed interfaces. But nether the less, that's inevitably how people navigate the web. So what does this bizaar sequence of interesting reads look like in Firefox as I'm browsing?

The Problem With Tabbed Interfaces I hate tabs in web browsers Tabextension3 Outsider FAQ iRider iRider Download Make Vista's Alt+Tab Thumbnail Bigger Where's Waldo? Where's Waldo (TV Series) HIT Entertainment Thomas and Friends Anthropomorthism Cosmological Argument

Except whilst doing that I was talking to a couple of people on IM, and one of my friends always sends me about 4 links as a replacement for the traditional "Hello, how are you?" so it really looks like this:

The Problem With Tabbed Interfaces I hate tabs in web browsers Openmoko Tabextension3 Outsider FAQ iRider Apple March 6th Event iRider Download Make Vista's Alt+Tab Thumbnail Bigger Audiosurf Where's Waldo? Where's Waldo (TV Series) HIT Entertainment Thomas and Friends Anthropomorthism Cosmological Argument

What links are related to the origional post? Which are the one's my friend sent me? How on earth did I get to Thomas and Friends? Who knows.

Interestingly IE uses a kludged tree. All the links you open from a webpage open in a list of new tabs after the current one. This means that you get a tree, only flattened into a list. It's quite confusing at first, but once you realise what it's doing it's useful at times. But why squash it into a list?

There's probably a plugin to make Firefox use a tree for tabs, but I've yet to find it.