Re:Open-source browser history page with analytics
by millertime802 on Saturday December 12, 2020 @03:48PM
(#25401563)
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!
Re:Open-source browser history page with analytics
by petercooper on Saturday December 12, 2020 @05:28PM
(#25402379)
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.
Re:Open-source browser history page with analytics
by tfsh on Saturday December 12, 2020 @09:28PM
(#25403787)
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.
Re:Open-source browser history page with analytics
by lazyresearcher on Saturday December 12, 2020 @09:32PM
(#25403814)
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.
Re:Open-source browser history page with analytics
by tfsh on Saturday December 12, 2020 @09:21PM
(#25403755)
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".
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.
It's an open-source "screen time" that stores everything locally, and supports (optionally) using a browser extension to gather browsing data.
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.
I often query the places.sqlite directly. Sqlite is missing some handy string functions though, but there's usually an extension available.
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".