WebReview

WebReview is an extension for Firefox 3.5 and 4.0. It enhances the abilities to re-find already visited websites based on your local history.

News

2010-12-15: WebReview is now compatible with Firefox 4.0!

2009-12-26: WebReview awarded to be one of "The 10 best new Firefox add-ons of 2009"! Thank you, cnet! ​http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10421221-12.html

Goals

WebReview addresses several problems that might occur when trying to find websites that where already visited before:

WebReview offers you a proactive interface called WebReview MyStart that shows web pages that are important for you, based on the browsing history of Firefox. There is no need to manually set bookmarks on pages you visit regularly. After some learning time, WebReview will automatically recommend them at the appropriate time to you.

The possibilities Firefox offers for finding web pages you already visited are very limited, especially if the visit was some days ago. The history sidebar groups the pages in folders that are far too general. This makes it rather difficult to find the right page in a list of hundrets or even thousands.
WebReview offers a table based view on your history, called WebReview Chronicle with several search- and sort-criteria making it easier to find the page you look for, even if you visited it a long time ago.

A problem that can happen quite often result from the way the browser-buttons "Back" and "Forward" work. If you go backwarts and then click on another link, it's impossible to reach the page where you clicked the "Back" button, through clicking the two buttons only. One branch of you browsing session is lost.
WebReview Graph cannot only display the complete tree you browsed currently, but visualizes also all browsing sessions with every visited web page in your history in a graph. You can find out, how you found a very interesting page even if it was months before (if your history of Firefox goes back that far). You can even export a whole graph to a single file for example for archiving or sharing purposes.

About the project

WebReview was developed by Andreas Wagner as part of a diploma thesis between 11/01/2008 and 04/30/2009. Andreas Wagner was student at the ​Univeristy of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern/Germany in Zweibruecken.
The diploma thesis was performed in cooperation with the ​German Research Center for Artifical Intelligence Kaiserslautern.

The title of this diploma thesis is:

"WebReview: Eine verbesserte Benutzerschnittstelle zum Wiederfinden bereits besuchter Webseiten mittels automatischer Erfassung, Analyse und Visualisierung von Webzugriffen" - [download as PDF] (in german)
(WebReview: An enhanced interface for re-finding already visited websites using automatic collection, analysis and visualization of web accesses)

Supervisors were ​Dr. Sven Schwarz, ​Prof. Dr. Andreas Dengel, and ​Prof. Dr. Thomas Walter.