Open-source browser history page with analytics

https://github.com/seanmiller802/BrowserTime

by millertime802 • 6 years ago

63 17 6 years ago

I've always thought that some cool insights could be drawn from examining a person's browser history, so I went ahead and built this chrome extension. It overrides the default history page with a better ui for searching and filtering, plus I've included an analytics page that provides some neat information about your browsing habits such as top sites and a category breakdown of your history. My friend suggested open sourcing this project because nobody wants to give an extension access to their history for obvious reasons. The extension has no tracking, no database, no user accounts, etc so its totally private for a user. Just figured some people might be interested in having the analytic of how they spend their time on the web. Hope some people find this interesting!

petercooper• 6 years ago

The extension has no tracking, no database, no user accounts, etc so its totally private for a user.

I, and I suspect most others, really appreciate knowing that. I think adding something along these lines to the Chrome Web Store description would really help as I imagine most people, even those who are not privacy conscious, might be skittish about any potential for their history to leak out.

millertime8025• 6 years ago

Great idea! Thanks :)

tfsh2• 6 years ago

I've been wanting to draw insights from my browsing history for a while, in particular; how my browsing history habits have changed over the course of months - to years. Unfortunately Chrome clears your history after n months which is a pain as I've enjoyed looking at other history visulation tools offered on the web store but am constantly disappointed by the lack of data Chrome provides.

Something I've been thinking about doing for a while is to create a history backup to a user controlled service (probably my VPS with an exposed API and pub key authentication), this could provide a seamless layer of access to help facilitate long term visualizations.

ErikBjare• 6 years ago

That's really cool, I've been building ActivityWatch (https://activitywatch.net) that shares similar goals.

It's an open-source "screen time" that stores everything locally, and supports (optionally) using a browser extension to gather browsing data.

mikestaub2• 6 years ago

I love ActivityWatch! I especially like the VSCode extension as it shows me which files I spend the most time in.

millertime8025• 6 years ago

Nice! It looks really cool and definitely more useful than what I've built haha. I'll check it out!

millertime8025• 6 years ago

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/browsertime/gaafoj...

mikestaub2• 6 years ago

This is great! Nice work

dbtc• 6 years ago

“Other” ;)

millertime8025• 6 years ago

there is a category for "Adult" if that is what you are implying haha

makeworld• 6 years ago

Anyone have suggestions for Firefox?

flas9sd• 6 years ago

there used to be this nice "about:me" extension (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/about:me), but is defunct. It's source is released at https://github.com/leibovic/about-me and waiting to be turned into a webextension.

I often query the places.sqlite directly. Sqlite is missing some handy string functions though, but there's usually an extension available.

obilgic• 6 years ago

I need a smart search engine for my browsing history, and end bookmarking.

tfsh2• 6 years ago

This is really cool, it looks sleek and I like the category break down. However there is a distinct lack of metrics, visualisations and avaliable data - seems the dashboard only shows me information from the last week. The page also kept freezing for me which is a major deterrent given it replaces the native Chrome history UI.

On that note, I'm surprised extensions can access and manipulate internal Chrome pages, that seems like a major oversight - especially as Chrome says "You're viewing a secure Google Chrome page".

lazyresearcher• 6 years ago

Might be out of scope of this extension but I'd like a way to visualize my history as a referral graph, what site brought me to which and where did I go after that.

IamZeroBalance• 6 years ago

Nice Job! very interesting..

Open-source browser history page with analytics

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