{"id":7,"date":"2004-03-23T00:13:11","date_gmt":"2004-03-23T07:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=7"},"modified":"2005-07-31T03:56:42","modified_gmt":"2005-07-31T10:56:42","slug":"internet-explorers-history-is-useless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/archives\/2004\/03\/23\/internet-explorers-history-is-useless\/","title":{"rendered":"Internet Explorer’s history is useless."},"content":{"rendered":"

The history pane in Internet Explorer 5 and 6 tries to be intelligent and user-friendly, but in practice it seems almost completely useless.<\/p>\n

Consider this scenario: You surf the web and follow a lot of random links. The next day, you try to find a specific page again.<\/p>\n

I do not believe this is an uncommon task. How can you accomplish this in IE<\/acronym>? IE’s history has a “View » By Date” option<\/a>, where it separates history items by day or by week. Unfortunately, within each day, items are sorted alphabetically by site. This is counter-productive; if users remembered the address of the site, why would they need to look for it in the history pane?<\/strong><\/p>\n

(IE also has a “View » By Order Visited Today” option, where it lists each page you’ve visited during the past day in chronological order. Unfortunately, when Microsoft says “today”, they really mean today<\/em>, not the past 24 hours. IE is not friendly to late-night web surfers; once the clock on your PC rolls past midnight, say goodbye to history items from 11:59 PM; you now have to remember the site address if you want to find them again. Oh, and if it just turned Monday, your history items from Sunday are now lost amidst all other items from “Last Week”.)<\/p>\n

The only alternatives are to try to retrace the original steps or to try to find it with a search engine, both tedious chores.<\/p>\n

Why should a seemingly simple task be so incredibly hard?<\/p>\n

Netscape\/Mozilla have done it right for ages. They allow you to view all<\/em> history items in a single, flat list. Superficially, it might not appear to be as organized as IE’s hierarchical history pane, but it’s infinitely more useful, and it’s simpler too.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, years of using IE have weaned me away from using browsers’ valuable history features. Ugh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The history pane in Internet Explorer 5 and 6 tries to be intelligent and user-friendly, but in practice it seems almost completely useless. Consider this scenario: You surf the web and follow a lot of random links. The next day, you try to find a specific page again. I do not believe this is an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantsraves","category-usability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}