Google Chrome Canary recently introduced the option to clear plug-in related temporary contents when clearing the browsing data, and it appears that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer will follow suit.

A recent post on the Internet Explorer blog highlights the change: Microsoft has added relevant APIS back when Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 was released. With Adobe’s implementation of the new controls in Flash Player 10.3, it is now possible to delete Flash Cookies directly in Internet Explorer.

Adobe is implementing the new controls in Flash Player 10.3 which is currently available as a release candidate. Users who want to clean Flash Cookies in Internet Explorer need to download and install the Flash Player 10.3 release candidate, but do not need to make direct changes to Internet Explorer. The final version of Adobe Flash Player 10.3 will be released in the near future.

Microsoft has created a demo page where users can test the new feature.

You can use the demo page to create a Flash Cookie which gets saved on your system. You can test that by pressing F5 or reloading the page with a click on the reload button. The page should echo the information that a Flash Cookie is stored on your system.

This Flash Cookie, along with all others, will be deleted if you delete Internet Explorer’s browsing history. You can delete the browsing history under Tools > Safety > Delete Browsing History. Please note that you need Adobe Flash Player 10.3 or newer for this to work.

Both Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9 support the feature out of the box.

The demonstration page works flawlessly under Google Chrome as well, which means that Canary users can test their browser’s cookie cleaning functionality as well.

Other browser developers like Mozilla have already announced that they will integrate Flash Cookies cleaning in future browser versions as well.

It seems as if we are finally able to resolve the Flash Cookies problem once and for all.

Pop-up History is an extension for the Chrome browser that displays the web browsing history directly in the main Chrome interface. If you are a Chrome user you know that you can display the browsing history by pressing Ctrl-H or by clicking on the Tools icon and then on History.

The problem with this is that the History in the Google browser opens in a new tab, which is not the most comfortable option.

Chrome Pop-up History places an icon in the Google Chrome address toolbar. A click on the icon displays the last entries in the Chrome browsing history. Listed are the page titles, the time that has passed since the visit to the website and the number of visits to that page.

A click on an entry in the history opens the page in a new tab in the web browser. The listing contains dozens of history entries. A search is provided at the top that automatically updates the listing after entering a search term. That’s for instance helpful if the item is not amongst the most recent history items.

Chrome users can download and install Pop-up History from the official Google Chrome Extensions repository.

Voyage is a Firefox add-on that can visualize the surfing history of the user. It starts to record the visited websites and their relation right after installation and can be accessed at anytime by entering about:voyage into the Firefox address bar. The same screen is also accessible from the History > Voyage menu.

Voyage displays each visited website in a circle that displays the website’s favicon in the center. The circle size changes depending on the number of visits to a website so that the most popular destinations can be recognized on first glance.

Hovering the mouse over a circle will display the relations to other circles by drawing lines to them. It will furthermore display a maximum of three page titles of pages that have been visited on the domain and the total amount of pages that have been accessed.

A left-click on a circle will open the full list of pages that have been accessed on the domain. Information displayed include the page title, time the resource was accessed and the from and to relations to other circles.

Another interesting option is the Twitter integration of Voyage which allows Twitter users to integrate the last 90 days of Twitter to a maximum of 500 tweets in the timeline.

Voyage is an interesting Firefox add-on that can be useful for users who would like to work with a visual representation of their surfing history. The add-on is compatible with all Firefox 3.5+ versions and can be downloaded directly from the Mozilla Add-on repository.

That’s where the new Firefox add-on History Tree comes into play. History Tree can generated a tree structure from the Firefox history in realtime. It can either visualize the history of one tab at a time or all tabs at once.

The name and time of each website are displayed in rectangles on the screen. Connections visualize that websites have been opened after each other. A color code is being used to provide additional information:

• Orange: Active Firefox Tab
• Yellow: Open Tabs
• Blue: Closed Tabs
• White: Pages that can be accessed with the back and forward buttons in Firefox
• Gray: Pages that cannot be accessed with the back and forward buttons

A click on the question mark will display a preview screenshot of the selected website on the same screen while a click on the triangle hides the sub-pages from the display and replacing them with a number representing their amount. Websites can be opened by left-clicking on their boxes in the history tree window.

Filters are available on top to display specific tabs only. Those can be open tabs, open pages, selected tabs or closed tabs. A search aids the user in finding information faster.

It is furthermore possible to change the tree view to a thumbnail view of the visited websites instead. This will display all websites as thumbnail images in the same window.

History Tree distinguishes between different Firefox windows, something that the default Firefox history manager is not offering as it only displays a combination of all visited pages regardless of the window they have been opened in.

One thing that would be nice would be the configuration of a default action when left-clicking on a thumbnail or box in the History Tree window so that users could open sites with just one click instead of having to work with the selection box all the time.

Historian is a free portable software program that can process the browsing history of several popular web browsers and export the information into csv or text format. Supported browsers are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox 2 and 3, Google Chrome and Opera. This includes information about bookmarks, the browsing history, downloads, cookies and cache information.

The usability of the software program is not optimal. One has to drag and drop the files that are storing the information from the web browser’s directories into the interface to process them. This can obviously only be done if the user knows the location and names of those files. It is likely that only a minority knows that Firefox is storing its bookmarks in a file called places.sqlite or that Opera is storing information about file downloads in download.dat.

The only other limitation is that the only files of the same type can be analyzed at the same time. There is practically no way of adding all browsing history files of various installed web browsers in one go to the application because of their different formats. The workaround would be to create the csv files (or text) for each source file and copy paste the information into one big csv file in the end.

It would be a great improvement if the software developer would add an automatic scan of the system to the software program. It would also be nice if different files could be queued in the application so that they could be processed together.

Historian on the other hand is a versatile portable program that can identify the browsing history of all popular web browsers with the exception of Safari.