There are lots of graphical history viewers, I use gitk mostly and git-big-picture to get a graphical overview graph without individual commits. The gitg GUI from GNOME is fairly good too, and of course there are better tools for proprietary operating systems.
For local development, I'm actually content with what I get from the Git command line interface: I use a slightly customized variant of `git log --oneline --graph`.
The problem is that I am often browsing the history of repositories hosted on Github via the Github web interface, along with other interactions such as searching through issues and PR history. Cloning a repo to my local machine and firing up gitk is a pretty inconvenient interruption of the web browsing experience.
