Lossless Web Navigation with Trails

Patryk Adaś' published a set of speculative design ideas in 2017 that hint at a more Git-like, branching way to view browsing history. Adaś argued we should move away from the concept of tabs in browsers, and instead present histories as a set of trails.

I should be able to scroll through the history of my browsing as an enormous branching graph that I can annotate, travel around, share with others, and version.

But very few interfaces do a brilliant job of the third need: showing me where I've been and how I got here. We can do it at small scales. Patterns like breadcrumbs help us navigate through website or wiki with lots of subpages, but those don't scale well beyond ~7 steps.

Edgelessness is in the web’s structure: it’s comprised of individual pages linked together, so its structure can branch out forever.

You should be able to easily see connections between all of the web pages you have open at once, any subset of them, and explore them / navigate through them visually.

This stems from the structure of the web — it’s a tangle of links, a jumble of interconnected ideas. It fractalizes our attention, nudging us to leave fragments of our mind trapped in open tabs like a thousand tiny horcruxes — open loops feeding off our attention until they wither away, replaced by our latest distraction.

There’s a bottleneck here:

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