Wish you could remember all the sites you browsed easily, without having to deal with the standard and not very useful browser history? Tired of not being able to return to a certain page that you visited just two minutes before?

History Tree is an add-on for Firefox that displays your browsing history as a tree, so that you can easily know in which order you visited pages lately.

After installation, History Tree integrates itself into the “Tools” Firefox menu, or can be simply displayed anywhere on the toolbar for easy launch.

Viewing Screenshots of Visited Pages

A screenshot of every page that you visit during your browsing session can be viewed by clicking on the History Tree window’s GridView button (as shown below). Screenshots of selected pages can also be viewed one at a time in TreeView (shown above) by clicking on the button shown below each TreeView box.

Using the History Tree

The screenshot below shows History Tree’s TreeView. The box shown at the top of the screenshot shows a summary of your current browsing session. Each of the other boxes represents one of the pages you have visited. The page description and the time that the page was first accessed is shown inside each box.

The second row of boxes shown in the screenshot represent the tabs that are currently open in Firefox. The box representing the currently selected Firefox tab has an orange header. Boxes representing open tabs have a yellow header and boxes representing closed tabs (not shown in the screenshot) have a blue header. This colour scheme is also used to display the GridView page descriptions.

The box with a pink background represents the page that is currently open in Firefox. Boxes with a white background represent pages that can be accessed by clicking on the Firefox history ‘Back’ and ‘Forward’ buttons. Boxes with a grey background represent pages that cannot be accessed using the ‘Back’ and ‘Forward’ buttons. These pages are referred to below as ‘closed’ pages.

Clicking on a button shows a large screenshot of the associated history page. Clicking on a button hides the sub-tree that lies below that button. When a sub-tree is hidden the number of hidden boxes is shown inside the button. For example, if was shown this would tell you that four boxes were hidden below. Clicking on the button would then reveal the hidden sub-tree. Shrinking and expanding sub-trees in this way can be very useful when viewing large history trees.

Opening History Pages

The window shown below can be opened by clicking on any TreeView box or on any GridView screenshot. This window allows you to quickly view any of the pages that you have visited during your browsing session.

• Select the first option shown in the window to go directly to the history page that you clicked on, without adding a new page to Firefox.
• Select the second option to open your selected page in the currently selected Firefox tab. If the page is already shown in the current tab then that tab will appear, but a page will not be added.
• Select the third option to open your selected page in a new tab. The new tab will be added by History Tree and the required page will appear within it.
• Select the fourth option to view the page in the tab selected from the listbox (shown below the option list). The listbox shows all of the tabs that you have opened in the currently selected Firefox window.




Using the Control Panel

The control panel allows you to load the page history for any selected Firefox window, switch between four different history views, quickly find any page you have visited and adjust the size of the history page screenshots that you decide to view.






Limitations

History Tree does not save history page screenshots and closed tabs when a Firefox window is closed. This means that when a Firefox window is opened History Tree will load the same set of pages as Firefox (if the tabs were saved when Firefox was closed), i.e. a chain of saved history pages will be loaded into each tab. However, the ability to save and restore the full history tree will be added to the next version of History Tree.

History page screenshots cannot be viewed until those pages have been loaded into a Firefox tab (only the page descriptions can be viewed). This is partly a consequence of not saving the screenshots and partly due to how Firefox works, since it would be impossible for any application to capture screenshots of pages that have not been loaded.

This limitation becomes apparent if you choose to save your tabs when closing Firefox. For example, if you saved four tabs each containing ten pages when you closed Firefox, then when Firefox was restarted only four page images would be captured (one page image per tab). This could be rectified by visiting each page, so that History Tree could capture the screenshots.



Here you can watch a video by Tekzilla in which History Tree is explained in all of its features: