SmileOnMyMac’s BrowseBack is an application based on an interesting idea, and one that initially appealed to me. In short, it’s a webpage archiver, that allows you to go back and see PDFs of webpages that you’ve viewed in the past, even when you’re offline.

The first time you open BrowseBack, you get a little setup screen which asks you how far back you want to load archives for. Basically, BrowseBack will look at your Web History and load all of the pages from your web history as far back as you tell it to go into its archives. This initial setup takes a little while and can hog your processor, so I wouldn’t recommend loading farther back than a day, however once the initial setup is finished, BrowseBack is fairly lightweight on your processor while you browse the web, and BrowseBack simply archives pages as you load them in your browser.

One of the things that impressed me about BrowseBack was it’s pretty wide browser support. BrowseBack can archive pages that you’ve viewed with Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer (no one uses that on Mac anymore!), Netscape, OmniWeb, Camino, and Opera, and you can turn these on/off with checkboxes in BrowseBack’s preferences. BrowseBack also includes some smart preferences that let you specify a maximum size for the BrowseBack archive and how long to keep web pages in the archive, along with a blacklist where you can specify domains where BrowseBack shouldn’t archive.

BrowseBack has kind of an interesting way to “browse back” through its archives, and I personally find it a little bit clunky, as it takes awhile to look around. When you click on BrowseBack’s Dock icon (it doesn’t offer a menubar icon, unfortunately), it fades in a fullscreen viewer that looks kind of a three-level library shelf. Mousing around over these “shelves” will produce an effect similar to the Dock’s magnification as you go over thumbnails of webpage archives. If you hover over a particular thumbnail for a few seconds, the “shelves” will move over to the side a bit to make room for a full-size snapshot. If you click, the options for that archive will show up, or if you move the mouse, you can keep looking. At either side of the display are left/right arrows to move through the archives, and each level of the “shelf” (I made up the word shelf to describe the display) offers a timestamp to help you go through. BrowseBack also includes a Search field which can search the archives. Also, when you mouse around, a little box shows the name of the website, the URL, an excerpt, and when the page was last accessed and cached. When you click on an archive, five options show which allow you to view the page in your web browser, e-mail the archive as a PDF, open the archive as a PDF, save the archive as a PDF, and print the archive as a PDF.

The idea behind BrowseBack is very innovative and attractive, however in practice, it doesn’t work very well. BrowseBack actually tries to load the page itself once you’ve viewed it, and that causes some problems due to the fact that BrowseBack doesn’t necessarily carry the cookies and things that my web browser does. Therefore, any time I’m browsing to a place that requires you to be logged in, BrowseBack archives the login form over and over instead of what I’m actually viewing. In addition, the quality of the snapshots isn’t that good, often missing necessary text styling and graphics, even though I have the option to archive graphics and images turned on. What I think would make more sense would be to take an exact replica of the HTML outputted by the web browser and store that in the archive–this would make the snapshots more accurate and also reduce load on the processor and the network for double-downloading.

In conclusion, BrowseBack is a very innovative application that really has me interested in it, but in practice, it does a rather poor job of generating accurate archives of webpages to be particularly useful. I would recommend holding off on registering it until SmileOnMyMac makes some necessary fixes and improvements, which I hope will be soon, because I’d really love to be able to make this application an integral part of my workflow.

Final Rating:

Tags: archives, Mac, PDF, review, Software, web browsing, web pages