I was listening to a Dot Net Rocks show recently, and the topic of the MS IE platform's evolution came up.  They mentioned a couple of features they'd like to see in IE, like Tabbed Browsing.

So over the weekend, I was thinking of features that I'd like to see. Now, I was trying to take a nap at the time, and must've been half asleep, because most of the ideas I came up with weren't too good.  Like “3D Browsing.“  This idea would be to break apart a web page into layers like images, advertisments, text links, and allow the user to view one or more layer at a time.  Well, not all that great of an idea, but then again, I was half asleep.

But an idea I had that I think could work would be “Tree History.“  This would be an enancement to the back and next buttons, which would give you an option to decend branches of your history's tree.  Currently, with IE, when you click the next button, you have the option to load your history pane or go to the next history page on the stack.  Often, I find myself wanting to back up and decend a previously visited branch of my history. So, instead of this:

Clicking my next button would give me an option to go to different branches of my history, if present, like this:

I'd think this would be pretty easy to implement.  So easy that I'm sure it's been done before.  If you've had an idea for a new feature, post it here.

-Brendan