Track Safari’s Web Page Trail With BrowseBack.

Yes, old dawgs can be taught new tricks. I complained to Kate (Mac360 writer) that I found some web sites she should look at, but I forgot to bookmark them.

I usually keep Safari’s Private Browsing option turned on, so there’s no history of which web pages I visited.

So Kate taught me something new about keeping myself organized. Let the Mac do it and don’t think about it.

She insisted that I try BrowseBack. If you like what you see in OS X Leopard’s Time Machine feature, then you’ll like what you get with BrowseBack. Simply put, it takes a snapshot of every web page you visit.

Once you decide to go back to find a web page, BrowseBack becomes a thumbnail web page browser, that, here it comes, lets you “browse back” to the page in question. True, it’s not an iTunes CoverFlow visual experience, but it’s similar.

The whole process is rather transparent to most of us who like to know what’s always going on inside our Macs. Install BrowseBack, set it up, let it record all your browser’s web page visits, then look to see what you saw.

BrowseBack gives thumbnails of the browser history, lets you search the web page history using keywords (much more handy than it sounds, especially after visiting a gazillion web sites), and can export web pages as a PDF.

At first, I thought nothing was happening. I installed BrowseBack and went about my daily web page routine for a few days, then decided to check it out. BrowseBack pops up on your screen like a stack of printed web pages with navigation controls. Go backwards, forwards, open, select, search by date or keywords.

It’s really that simple. Backups are always important, and many Mac users look forward to Time Machine because it saves “snapshots” of your Mac’s files for later retrieval. Think of BrowseBack doing the same thing with all the web pages you visit using Safari or Firefox.

Each web page becomes a PDF file which can be searches, saved, emailed, or whatever else you do with PDF files. The key is that you don’t have to do anything to make it happen. Safari has a nice Web Archive feature, but that requires you to stop what you’re doing, save the page someplace, move on, thereby creating a momentary distraction. BrowseBack eliminates the distraction.

Negatives? Someone with access to your Mac can not only see the URLs of every page you’ve visited, but can also see the page, albeit in PDF form. That feature might cause some grief with Safari and Firefox users in an office environment. You gotta love the digital bread crumbs we leave lying all over the place these days. Or not.