Firefox 115 has some deficiencies for dealing with website history. It does not have the option to display history by day with the items arranged by time (when the View setting is set to Date). Instead, they are arranged alphabetically for each day. Firefox does not allow for selectively removing all instances of URLs of the same domain from history (the Forget About This Site option affects cookies and other data also). There is no function to backup or export the history data specifically.
Note that the list of downloads that can be seen with the clicking of Firefox's library or downloads button is independent of the general history, although the names of downloaded files do appear in the general history. Clearing the downloads list does not remove them from the general history. The extensions that display general history also have that downloads file information.
I am looking at extensions that deal with the history feature's inadequacies. Broadly, there are are three categories of these extensions -- displaying, filtering, and exporting, though for any particular extension, two or three of those functions could be present.
boof (OP) replied with this 5 days ago, 3 minutes later, 6 minutes after the original post[^][v]#1,413,545
I will first list the extensions that I have looked at. For each category, I am listing the ones that I find the most useful first. I will describe each extension later.
displaying - Improved History/ Improved History (With Shortcut), History Helper, Advanced Browser History, History Master, Better-History, Better History NG
filtering - Delete History, History AutoDelete/ History AutoDelete Rebooted, History Manager, History Zebra, Forget Me Not - Forget cookies & other data, HistoryBlock, DynamicHistory, ClearTrace Browser - Automatic History Cleaner
exporting - History Export, History Porter, History Exporter | Web Wrapped, Browser History Export
boof (OP) double-posted this 4 days ago, 1 day later, 1 day after the original post[^][v]#1,413,759
Improved History
When you run it, you get a little window thing that is too small to work in. I had to make userContent.css lines and a link to the quoted URL referenced in the first line to get a useful tab.
reminder: You have to make a userContent.css file and create a folder named chrome and put that in your Firefox profile folder. And, you additionally have to enable toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets in about:config since Firefox 69 so that the css file gets used. https://www.userchrome.org/firefox-changes-userchrome-css.html#fx69
Now when you paste moz-extension://2a57908e-4cf3-4ff6-80b3-ea3e04fc8c8b/data/popup/popup.html in the address bar you get a proper space to look at the history with. I made a bookmark to that address for convenience and run the extension by going to the bookmark.
The history contents are seen grouped by day and are properly sorted in order with the most recent first. Page titles and specific times are given with the URLs. The screen has buttons for every day of the week, and buttons to skip to the previous week and to skip back to the next week. There is no quick way to navigate to specific date or range of dates. There is a search function for listing history contents with any match to parts of page title or URL text. The searching is always for the whole history with no time specification available, but results show immediately anyhow. Single history items can be deleted at a time, or as a set timed within the same one-hour period. It would be better to be able to delete more items simultaneously, especially matches for specific site searches.
boof (OP) triple-posted this 4 days ago, 4 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^][v]#1,413,761
Improved History (With Shortcut)
This extension is the same as Improved History, but it is supposed to have the ability to work with it in a tab, built in. However, that did not happen. The display can be better than the original though, with no information cut off by the small window size, but that effect was inconsistent. Here are lines for userContent.css to get a useful tab for the referenced URL.
@-moz-document url("moz-extension://c14e6ef7-b49a-4b87-a7dd-7ceaab6629c0/data/popup/popup.html") {
body {
width: 1600px !important;
}
.historyWrapper {
max-height: 790px !important;
}
}
Anonymous B replied with this 4 days ago, 2 hours later, 1 day after the original post[^][v]#1,413,771
You need to get this right, Sheila. If you can get Firefox's history just right, then everything will flow from that. Women will flock to you when they see how optimised your browser is, riches will come easily when you can find all of the best financial advice easily in your history. Other men don't think about this stuff, and they miss out, stumbling through the internet blindly.
Anonymous C joined in and replied with this 3 days ago, 7 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^][v]#1,413,791
Interesting!
Out of curiosity, can I get a list of what extensions you have installed? I want to spruce up my Firefox. I have uBlock, FoxyProxy and a few others that solve niche issues or generally de-shittify my browsing experience (like removing the referrer links in Google search results so you get the plain URL not a redirect tracking link).
boof (OP) double-posted this 3 days ago, 17 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^][v]#1,413,798
I need to correct information where I refer to moz-extension://c14e6ef7-b49a-4b87-a7dd-7ceaab6629c0/data/popup/popup.html and moz-extension://2a57908e-4cf3-4ff6-80b3-ea3e04fc8c8b/data/popup/popup.html in my posts about Improved History. It turns out that "The UUID after moz-extension is unique per Firefox profile" so what I gave here would be different for your profile. So, I need to give you instructions on how to find these things for your extension installations.
OK, run the extension by clicking its toolbar button so that you get its popup to appear. Then, rightclick within that popup and click View Page Source. In the new tab's URL that appears, you will find the moz-extension URL bit that you need, following the start where it says "view-source:".
boof (OP) triple-posted this 3 days ago, 10 hours later, 1 day after the original post[^][v]#1,414,001
History Helper
History contents are not shown until either the Search button is clicked or the Enter key is pressed. The purpose of the extension is to list history items that conform to your search parameters, which include the ability to search by title or URL. Date ranges can be specified, and sorting can be done alphabetically by title or URL, or be done by last visited. Searching with the All time setting provides results as fast as with a shorter time period. The limitation is that the slider that sets the number of history entries to look through has a maximum of 100,000. The order of the results can be reversed. Dates and times of visits are displayed in the results with page titles and URLs. The way the contents fit in the screen by default, only three results are visible at at time, but the view can be improved greatly by clicking at a small doubled chevron that points upward within a thin white band above the listed results. Clicking it again will provide more room for listed results again. There is a small doubled chevron that points downward within the white band that can be clicked at to return the view back to the way it was. Single history items can be deleted at a time, which is not ideal. It would be better to be able to delete more than one at a time.
You can list history without specifying a search with merely leaving the search area blank, and clicking Search (or press Enter).
boof (OP) quadruple-posted this 2 days ago, 1 day later, 3 days after the original post[^][v]#1,414,346
Advanced Browser History
The history contents are by default sorted and grouped by URL domain alphabetically. Each domain listed can be clicked to show all visited pages with their titles and URLs. The time period covered can be set to any of: Last 7 days, Last 1 month, Last 3 months, Last 1 year, and All time. However, with selecting All time, the animated busy indicator never stopped and results did not change. The sorting can be changed to by date, with each day listed with the most recent URLs first. There are no specific times given with the URLs. More than one URL can be deleted at once by first putting checkmarks to chose entire domains or individual URLs within, or to choose days. Something called URL groups can be made, which are custom groups of URLs. URLs can be put with wildcards to match URLS based around a basic part. URL groups can be set to prevent ever being added to history (blacklisted). Alternatively, URLs in history that belong to a group can be deleted from history at once. There is no setting for whitelisting groups.
boof (OP) replied with this 1 day ago, 17 hours later, 3 days after the original post[^][v]#1,414,627
History Master
The history contents are displayed as titles with visit times, are seen grouped by day, and are properly sorted in order with the most recent first. That order can be reversed. The range of days made immediately available to browse can be set. The default is a list of all URLs for the last seven days. It looks like it is supposed to be showing website icons (favicons) in the listings, but there are empty image placeholders. History items can be searched for by text that is in the URLs and titles. You can only see search results for a single day at a time, requiring clicking through days to get through the results. Single history items can be deleted at a time, or all that are listed for a single day (see button at the list bottom), which is not ideal. Search results can be exported to a csv file (click the Sync button, click Export).
boof (OP) double-posted this 8 hours ago, 23 hours later, 4 days after the original post[^][v]#1,414,777
Better-History
The history contents are sorted by most recent first for every day showing, with each history item's title displayed with a link to the site. When displaying a single day, the visit times also show. Contents can be shown by day, week, or month. There is not much point to clicking the Month button, because it takes some time for results to show up in which only three items per day will fit at once. However, to navigate to a date months ago, that view helps to get there faster, as clicking the backward arrow several times to skip months can be done immediately without having to wait for every intermediate month of results to show up. There is no way to specify a date range. Searches can be done for text that is in titles and URLs. It can take some time for search results to appear, and if attempted for anything other than today, the page disappears.
Better History NG
This extension is the same as Better-History described above, but the searching problem is fixed. However, search results that span over a range of dates greater than what can be shown at once (one month) will not be easily browsed through.