Time-based Browser History

Idea Summary: Build a Firefox extension that will keep a time-history of your navigation, tabs, and scrolling and allow you to rewind and fast forward through your browsing sessions and allow you to jump to a point in time and see what you were seeing then.

My favorite text editor, Vim, recently introduced a feature where you can undo edits based on an elapsed amount of time. For example, you can issue a command to revert your last 5 minutes of work. This because possible because they now also support undo "trees". That means if you undo some changes, then make more changes and then undo those, you can now choose to "redo" from either the first set of changes or the second.

Text editing is a lot like web browsing. At any point in time, you're looking at one website but you go forward, you go back, you scroll up, you scroll down, you open tabs, you close them. And once you gone back and then started out down a different path, the browser forgets your "forward" history. Tabs have fixed this to some extent -- when you know you may want to go forward again. But what if you don't think that far ahead? Many times, I find myself knowing approximately when I was browsing a site, but not how I got there or how to get back.

So I had this idea for a firefox extension where you could A) select (create, manage, etc) a browsing session and B) move forward and backward in time within that session. This extension would have to track every tab open, close, navigation, and scroll event so that you could play, fast forward, and rewind. Like TiVo, it would have several speeds of FF and RW and pressing stop would account for reaction times.

With this extension, I could Pull up my browsing session from two days ago and jump to midnight. Then fast forward (or move a horizontal scroll bar) until I see that really hot chick again!

You can think of this extension as a global Forward and Back button that knows about all your tabs, all of your "back and forward trees" and can move you between them using time as a basis.

Offshoot idea: export a browsing session (or portion thereof) to a file and send it to a friend or post it online.

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