There is a useful feature missing from every webbrowser — a context button, that tells you what pointed you to the page you are looking at, so you can get some context, or an explanation, of what you are seeing.
How Did I Get Here?
The internet is full of tidbits like this,
How a car’s differential gear works
The video starts off with synchronized motorcycle riding but give it a minute.
If you click the link, but get distracted for a while before actually watching the video, then when you do watch it, it’s baffling. Why am I looking at old footage of motorcycles? *Close Video*. Without knowing to give it a minute, the video is something else entirely.
Many things don’t make sense without an explanation.
What About Back?
Sometimes the Back button can give you the source of the page your are looking at.
But if you use tabs, then usually it can’t.
And if the source of the link was in a native RSS reader or twitter client, then hitting back in Safari will never give you the source.
Even when Back “works”, there’s often so much information on the page, that it’s overwhelming to try and find the context to the link you clicked.
What’s needed is something that quickly gives you the relevant context, just the text surrounding the link, not descriptions of many links.
This sort of contextual meta-data really comes into it’s own when dealing with huge numbers of webpages. I believe it’s necessary now, and will only become more useful with time.
enough.
