Monitoring in an enterprise environment (for browsing) works on a network level; even SSL sites are monitored by on-the-fly certificates that are trusted by the users machine. There's no need to persist history to disk for an IT team to capture that information.

My favorite days are the one where central IT screws up the system, and we get certificate errors everywhere we go. Uh, do you think they're tracking us and snooping all supposedly secure communication? Naaaaaah. Luckily, I avoid most of those days working from home and NOT using the VPN. I SHOULD make sure I never log into something I care about (like iCloud) while on their network. The problem is that I can't get reception on my cell phone inside the building.

If you don't want your employer to see it, do it on your phone. Everyone should realise that by now.

I disagree with this, primarily because most enterprise solutions can track your traffic independently of the browser.

Sounds like something that would be much better controlled (i.e. "disabled") at the organizational level with a group policy setting.