As we surf the Internet, we bookmark the sites we may return to, and put those that we visit regularly on our browsers' toolbars, and all the while, the browsers' histories keep track of our activities in text-based links.

In contrast to the text-based links of bookmarks and histories, the BrowseBack application displays the histories of all the browsers you use in your searches graphically as thumbnails and displays these on your screen in chronological order. The thumbnails are arranged in three rows resembling a deck of overlapping playing cards over a transparent background. They can be searched by date, single words, or word strings using the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT, as well as by wildcards. BrowseBack saves the thumbnails in PDF format in a folder located in User/Documents/browseback. Only the first pages of visited sites are displayed.

With the thumbnails displayed on the screen, you can quickly scan by moving the cursor over them. As the cursor hovers over a thumbnail, its edges will be highlighted and simultaneously a summary of the web page showing its URL, the date you last visited it and when it was cached is displayed along with the logo identifying the website and the browser used in the search. The page will flip open after a delay to let you read its content.

If you click once on a thumbnail, symbols pop up offering the options: link to the browser showing that web page, e-mail the web page using Mail, view the page in PDF format, save the web page as an independent PDF File to your disk, or print it. Holding down the Control key and clicking on the same thumbnail offers two additional options: "Remove page" and "Exclude Host."

I had some problem with the print option. It worked only intermittently and despite the e-mailed customer support I received, I was unable to resolve the problem at the time of this writing.

You can continue scanning the thumbnails by moving the cursor to another thumbnail. Arrows at the bottom right and the top left let you move backward and forward through the thumbnails.

The "Remove Page" option will delete highlighted thumbnails from the list of stored PDF files. And "Exclude Host" lets you exclude sites you do not want saved and displayed. The program comes with default settings to exclude Google, Hotmail, Yahoo, and Excite mail. Other pages can be added to that list at any time. Excluding specified sites with the "Exclude Host" option saves disk space required for storing your web histories in the BrowseBack folder.

You also have the option of linking immediately to the host site by double-clicking on a thumbnail which will link you to the current page, the content of which may not always be the same as the one you had visited previously. This may be a justification for telling BrowseBack to save previously visited pages in their entirety to disk. An example of pages with frequently changing content would be newspapers. The drawback of saving web pages is the additional disk space required for saving them.

Installation of the program is straight forward. After it has been downloaded as a .dmg file from the SmileOnMyMac website, double-clicking the disk image brings up the Install button and a Read Me file with instructions for installing and uninstalling the program.

On first launch, the first window that comes up is the Preferences panel for you to select the browser(s) from which you want to import web histories. The offered browsers are: Safari, Camino, FireFox, Flock, Internet Explorer, Netscape, OmniWeb, and Opera. I tested the program importing the histories from Safari and FireFox.

Other functions that can, and should, be set in Preferences are: the starting date of importing the histories, the Hot Key combination to activate the program (the program comes with a default Hot Key combination), whether to launch BrowseBack automatically on login, whether Command + Q will quit the program or not, whether to play sounds for actions or not, changing the background color and transparency, how much disk space to assign to save the web pages, how long to store the history files, and whether to save the entire content of web pages on disk or not.

Importing the web pages for the first time from the chosen starting date might take considerable time depending how far back you set the date for the import. Interestingly, the default setting is 12/31/1969. The import process can be interrupted and continued at any time by pressing the appropriate Pause and Restart buttons on the progress bar. Subsequent imports, if the program is running in the background, proceed much faster though not instantaneously. If you don't want to run the program in the background, it will 'catch up' once launched and import all the web pages you have visited since the last time you ran it. However, the interval before the web pages are displayed can then be extended, depending on how long it has been since you last ran the program.

Strengths:
BrowseBack is an application taking up a 9.7 MB of disk space. The program is easy to install and use. Displaying thumbnails of all visited web pages in any of the specified browsers streamlines reviewing web pages. The program is quickly activated when running in the background with user-definable Hot Keys, and cleared from the screen by either clicking outside the thumbnail display or Command + H. The ability to display an individual web page in PDF format is useful if you want to paste certain information from that page into other documents. The built-in search function allows searching by date, words, and keywords using Boolean operators and wildcards. The company provides excellent e-mail customer support with questions answered competently and often in less than 24 hours.

Weaknesses:
The response of displaying web page content and connecting to my printers was irritatingly slow. It is possible that these responses will be quicker a faster computer and/or running OS X 10.5 than what I experienced with my PPC G4, running OS X 10.4.11. Cursor control was somewhat delicate using a Logitech two-key trackball but seemed less so using a standard mouse.

Another weakness was the program's inability to delete a group of selected web pages in one fell swoop; instead, each page of that group has to be deleted individually with the "Remove Page" command. Saved pages eat up considerable disk space: 1200 page files took up 230 MB. Constant disk activity to save and recall thumbnails stresses the drive.

Features that would enhance the program: The ability to delete a group of thumbnails with one keystroke or command. Option to store only one page when the same page is accessed several times during one session. The repeat display of the same page clutters up the display unnecessarily. Faster response time for the display of web page content, retrieval and printing. A decrease in the amount of disk space required for the stored PDF files.

Summary:
The BrowseBack application displays web histories graphically on the screen as thumbnails. All searches, even when using multiple browsers, are saved as a single file in chronological order in PDF format. The contents of visited web sites can be rapidly scanned with options of e-mailing, saving, and printing pages. Several preference settings allow users to tailor the program to suit their surfing habits.

Casual surfers who are well organized and dutifully add and group bookmarks, or who mark frequently visited web sites in their browser's toolbar, may find the overhead of running the program and the additional disk space required not worth their while. However, users who need, or want, to document their Internet searches and collect web references for writing of reports, for instance, will appreciate being able to search the Internet for relevant information without having to worry about bookmarking pages, especially highly dynamic ones, like newspapers, that change and refresh their pages frequently.