It's Not the Destination, It's The Journey

Often when I surf chasing down some specific topic for work (software development in particular, but likely applicable to a wider set of disciplines), surfing in one browser window is destructive -- you don't want to lose the information you just saw -- you just want to explore further.

Tabs help, of course, and various breadcrumbs schemes have existed since the beginning of browsing too, but I'm looking for something a bit more usable -- at any given time, I might have a dozen or more tabs open on a related subject, all with pieces of useful info and a link to other pieces of useful info. Finding just the right tab afterwords often winds up causing another brute force search, or an annoying hunt for info among the previously open tabs.

I'm envisioning some sort of cross-linked browsing history tree structure, with page titles and maybe image and text abstracts, that is able to display, for any given page, the pages I navigated to get there (up to the top empty google page), with all cross-linking (such that if I wind up on a given page from multiple directions I can see that) -- and even optionally some indicators showing how the pages are linked even though those are links I didn't actually follow.

This would let me assemble my train of thought, retrace any information I saw but forgot to note in the rash to explore related links further, and generally present a fascinating display tree particularly when exploring say, fetish porn.

See, made you read to the end, heh heh