The Chaser: Chrome Extension for History Visualization

Information

• Publication Type: Bachelor Thesis
• Workgroup(s)/Project(s):
  • Visual Computing: Illustrative Visualization
• Date: 2014
• Date (Start): January 2014
• Date (End): August 2014
• Matrikelnummer: 1025952
• First Supervisor: Manuela Waldner

Abstract

Revisitation of previously requested URLs happens frequently and the most common list-view-based visualization of the user’s browsing history provided by nearly every internet browser cannot give a compact general view. For this reason we designed and implemented an extension for Chrome called The Chaser, by which an alternative visualization of the content is possible. The currently available add-ons / extensions have other aims to illustrate the history. Some of them are about to show the differences in quantity of called pages. Others give an overview of page paths and the user’s tracks from site to site. Our extension concentrates on helping finding a visited page and giving users a better overview of their called URLs. The user should get the ability to control the time-line with mouse gestures and/or keyboard input. After discarding a 3D prototype we came to the conclusion of designing a simple, self-explanatory time-based illustration with two dimensions. The x-axis represents the time with different levels of detail and the y-axis the visited hosts. After performing an evaluation with six probands where The Chaser’s visualization and its efficiency was compared to the standard list-view, all of them would prefer our extension against the standard history view.

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BibTeX

@bachelorsthesis{boesch_2014_browserHistoryVis,
  title =      "The Chaser: Chrome Extension for History Visualization",
  author =     "Chris B\"{o}sch",
  year =       "2014",
  abstract =   "Revisitation of previously requested URLs happens frequently
               and the most common list-view-based visualization of the
               user’s browsing history provided by nearly every internet
               browser cannot give a compact general view. For this reason
               we designed and implemented an extension for Chrome called
               The Chaser, by which an alternative visualization of the
               content is possible. The currently available add-ons /
               extensions have other aims to illustrate the history. Some
               of them are about to show the differences in quantity of
               called pages. Others give an overview of page paths and the
               user’s tracks from site to site. Our extension
               concentrates on helping finding a visited page and giving
               users a better overview of their called URLs. The user
               should get the ability to control the time-line with mouse
               gestures and/or keyboard input. After discarding a 3D
               prototype we came to the conclusion of designing a simple,
               self-explanatory time-based illustration with two
               dimensions. The x-axis represents the time with different
               levels of detail and the y-axis the visited hosts. After
               performing an evaluation with six probands where The
               Chaser’s visualization and its efficiency was compared to
               the standard list-view, all of them would prefer our
               extension against the standard history view.",
  address =    "Favoritenstrasse 9-11/E193-02, A-1040 Vienna, Austria",
  school =     "Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms, Vienna
               University of Technology ",
  URL =        "https://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2014/boesch_2014_browserHistoryVis/",
}