Minichan

You remind me of a guy who loves cars, and is constantly modding and tweaking his car. But for you, you love your internet browser instead.

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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

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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

@-moz-document url("moz-extension://2a57908e-4cf3-4ff6-80b3-ea3e04fc8c8b/data/popup/popup.html") {
body {
width: 1600px !important;
}
.historyWrapper {
max-height: 790px !important;
}
}

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.

(Edited 3 minutes later.)

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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;
}
}

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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.

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yay!

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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).

(Edited 20 seconds later.)

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@previous (C)
OK I'll start a thread for miscellaneous extensions sooner or later

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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:".

(Edited 2 minutes later.)

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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).

(Edited 1 minute later.)

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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.

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Nice but I use chrome

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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).

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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.

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But is the booty wet tho?

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https://www.lifewire.com/top-internet-browsers-4589106

01
of 10
Most Diverse Web Browser: Opera

02
of 10
Best All-Around Web Browser: Firefox

03
of 10
Best Private Browser: DuckDuckGo

04
of 10
Best Web Browser With a VPN: Aloha

05
of 10
Most Functional Browser: Google Chrome

06
of 10
Most Secure Web Browser: Brave

07
of 10
Best Browser for Windows: Microsoft Edge

08
of 10
Best Internet Browser for Multitasking: Vivaldi

09
of 10
Best Internet Browser for Apple Users: Safari

10
of 10
Best Browser for Saving YouTube Videos on iPhone: Documents by Readdle

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OK, I will now describe the extensions that have a history filtering function.

There are many extensions that have the ability to prevent or allow specific site domains to be added to the browser history with continued use (i.e. blacklist or whitelist). However it is rarer that an extension can easily remove items that are already stored. None of the extensions are especially good with selectively deleting all URLs of a specified domain from the browser history. What could be done instead is to save a backup file of the cookies, use Firefox's Forget About This Site feature (which removes cookies and history items), and then use then use the backup file of the cookies to restore them. That method would effectively remove a site's URLs from history and keep its cookies.

The extensions History AutoDelete and Delete History work to remove items from the history (with some fuss), however the size of the file that stores the information, places.sqlite, does not reduce in size. I am unclear if Firefox eventually compacts the file at some scheduled interval. Anyhow, there is a method in Firefox that accomplishes the task. Enter about:support into the address bar, scroll down to Places Database, Click Verify Integrity, wait for a delay anywhere from under a minute to many minutes, see a results table appear, and if "Unable to vacuum database" is there then try clicking Verify Integrity again.

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Delete History
This extension is not for listing and displaying history. It is for blacklisting and whitelisting URL domains from the browser's history. When at a site, clicking the extension's toolbar button allows for removing history items for that site specifically, or adding the site to either the blacklist or the whitelist. There is no way to enter URLs without visiting the associated sites. The extension allows listing a site according to the bare domain form of its URL, or sometimes an augmented URL referred to as host, and no other pattern. For example, when at the site page https://this.that.example.com/more, Domain gives example.com and Host gives this.that.example.com.

The blacklist is applied to stored items in the history by clicking a choice within the extension's popup regardless of the current site showing. The method of clearing everything except for whitelisted sites also can be done with a click within the popup. The blacklist and whitelist can not be set to prevent addition of items as sites are visited. There is a configuration setting to Enable Clearing Blacklist on Window close, but it did not work. There is also a configuration option to Enable Clearing Whitelist on Interval, and that also did not work. Also, there is no indication as to what that interval is. In my testing, upon clicking the "SAVE CHANGES" button at bottom of the configuration page, the message "Created alarm for removing history based on whitelist." appeared at lower right of screen. Nothing else happened other than upon every next restart of Firefox, that message appeared in the corner.

While Enable Clearing Blacklist on Window close and Enable Clearing Whitelist on Interval do not work, the popup choices Remove for [present site], Remove All but Whitelist, and Remove from Blacklist History generally work, though perhaps with some fuss. In my testing, I had the sidebar history open to watch the progress. Commonly, in less than five minutes, deletions apparently stall while the hard drive kept busy anywhere from 20 to 90 minutes. There may be a "not responding" message in the title bar. Closing Firefox can lead to the appearance of the Mozilla Crash Reporter some time later. Restarting Firefox and going through the chosen deletion function procedure again should lead to success, however.

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History AutoDelete and History AutoDelete Rebooted
The second of these is the same as the first but with a couple of very useful features added on. I will describe History AutoDelete and then I will describe what makes History AutoDelete Rebooted different from History AutoDelete.

History AutoDelete
This extension is not for listing and displaying history. The extension can be used to prevent specified URLs from being added to history with future browsing. URLs that are already in history can be removed by activating the extension while at a site and clicking Clear All History for this Domain. In my testing, the deletions of such URLs stall at some point, leaving URLs in the history (the process can be repeated after restarting Firefox to continue deletions, though). Also, after deletions and closing Firefox, the computer drive is busy for a while and then a "Firefox had a problem and crashed." message comes up.

Activating the extension while at a site allows for adding the domain to the blacklist by clicking either of Auto Delete Domain (example.com*) or Auto Delete Domain and SubDomain (*example.com*). The asterisks are wildcards that represent any number of additional characters. The Auto Delete Domain choice works regardless of https:// or https://www. being at the start of actual URLs, so that example.com* can mean https://example.com* and also https://www.example.com*. Notice that there is no option corresponding to example.com, with no asterisk. So, you would not be able to block youtube.com while keeping longer URLs that are based upon that one, such as youtube.com/@vwestlife.

In the options area of the extension, the URLs can be defined as patterns with wildcards so that * means any (or no) characters, and ? means any one character. It is necessary to put * at the end of any URL domain entered for there to be any effect. For example, putting youtube.com would not block anything, not even youtube.com. It will not work to start URLs with anything like https:// or https://www., as that part of the URL is inferred to be there by the extension. Oddly, after entering a pattern, the regular expression equivalent is shown, but there is no way to enter a regular expression yourself or edit the one showing. There is an option to set a maximum number of days to keep items in the browser history. There is no whitelisting functionality.

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History AutoDelete Rebooted
The extension is exactly like History AutoDelete, with the added ability to enter URL patterns as regular expressions in the List of Expressions page of the options area of the extension. There is also the ability to retroactively delete all matching URLs from the stored history for the whole blacklist at once by clicking a button in the History Settings page. Although there is no whitelisting feature, the use of an entered regular expression with a part called a negative lookahead allows for deletion of all entries that do not match a specific URL pattern (as described in more detail later in these notes). Oddly, once having added a regular expression pattern, it can not be edited, and the provided field to edit is for non-regular expressions only. If you want to modify a regular expression that was added already, the saved one has to be deleted and an entirely new one has to be entered.

In my testing, the retroactive deletion stalls out at some point, leaving URLs in the history. However, the process can be repeated any time later to continue the deletions to completion. Keep the history sidebar open to watch for deletions. When there is some large number of deletions to do, the deletion counter stops after a time and the visible deletions in the sidebar stop, but the computer drive can remain busy for quite a long time. Also watch to see if the dates being scanned through are continuing backwards, indicating that the search for items to delete is still occurring (oddly, the dates regress to 1969 or 1970). You can click a button to stop the process and start it later. You can close Firefox, and regardless of having Mozilla Crash Reporter appearing at some point, you can restart Firefox and resume the deletions. The stopping and starting, closing and restarting can be repeated as necessary to finish the process. When first apparently completed, repeat the process again to ensure that all matching URLs have been deleted. This will be the case when the extension shows that it has deleted 0 entries after reaching some sufficiently distant prior date in searching.

I describe many regular expression patterns for matching URLs in my notes in another thread. I will put two basic examples here.
For matching URLs built around the domain reddit.com: ^.*reddit\.com.*$
For matching URLs not built around the domain reddit.com: ^(?!.*reddit\.com.*).*$
Refer to https://minichan.net/topic/133261 for more details.

(Edited 2 minutes later.)

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