Firefox 3 History Recovery helps in all other cases. It is a command line tool that can analyse uncompressed disk images to discover traces of the four SQLite tables moz_places, moz_historyvisits, moz_formhistory and moz_downloads. What the recovery tool can return are therefor the visited urls, the form history and the downloads.

Firefox 3 History Recovery is a forensic tool and therefor not designed with usability in mind. It can only be executed from the command line and the biggest problem that users face is that they need to create a disk image for this process. The developer mentioned a few tools that can be used to create those disk images: winhex, ftk imager and dcfldd.

The program itself is easy to use in comparison. All the user needs to do is to enter the command

ff3hr -i


to start the recovery process. The command line tool will create four new text documents in its directory that will contain the information found on the disk image. Firefox 3 History Recovery is an Open Source software program that is available at the Sourceforge website.

Related posts

• Xkcd Comic Wallpaper Changer (2)
• Xenocode Web Browser Sandbox (0)
• Wireless Network Scanner inSSIDer (3)
• Windows Tabbed Browsing (4)
• Windows Run Aliases (8)

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.

Related posts

• Block Websites From Appearing In Firefox History (11)
• Youtube It Firefox Add-on (4)
• Youtube Comment Cloud Firefox Add-On (4)
• Web Development: Widerbug For Firefox (8)
• Web Browser: Firefox Cache Search (2)

Some users, especially those with the Google Toolbar installed, experienced a huge history database that had a size of several hundreds Megabytes. A good way of speeding up the Firefox web browser is to limit the history that it records.

Most users know that it is possible to change the minimum days the history is stored in the Firefox options. What only a few know is that there are additional settings in the about:config dialog that make it possible to change the hard limit and the maximum days a website is kept in the history.

To speed up Firefox by limiting the history do the following: Open a new web browser tab and load the page [about:config]. Now filter for the term [browser.history] and locate the following three parameters:

• browser.history_expire_days: The maximum days that Firefox stores websites in the history database. (default 180)
• browser.history_expire_days_min: The minimum days that Firefox stores websites in the history database (default 90)
• browser.history_expire_sites: Defines the hard limit (that is the maximum) of websites that are stored in the Firefox history. Reducing the amount from 40000 to a lower value can help a lot.

Reducing both the minimum and maximum values to a lower number can improve the performance of the web browser especially during startup. There are no perfect values which means that the user has to experiment a bit to find the values best suited for the browsing situation. Suggested values are 7,14,28 or 56 days for both settings. Users who want to get rid of the history completely need to use 0 as the value in both parameters.

Restarting the web browser after changing the parameters should get rid of the websites that exceed the maximum that has been set by the user. It might be needed to optimize the SQLite database after the procedure to ensure that the database is not fragmented because of this change.

Related posts

• Save Firefox Bookmark Searches (7)
• Quick Jump To Text Fields In Firefox (9)
• Prioritize Tabs In Firefox (1)
• Make Firefox Search For Terms With Periods In The Location Bar (15)
• Force Firefox To Open Links In Same Tab (14)

Firefox users have another possibility in the form of the Firefox History Block add-on. This add-on allows to specify websites or domains that should not be added to the Firefox history. Every other website and domain is added to the Firefox history normally.

New websites and domains can be added by simply opening the options in the Firefox add-on menu which gives users the opportunity to block urls from being displayed in the Firefox history. The very same menu offers the means to unblock websites the same way they are blocked. There is unfortunately no way of managing the list of blocked add-ons more easily. There is no way of displaying the blocked websites and domains at the moment.

The Block History add-on is available at the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

Related posts

• Display Firefox Browsing History With History Tree (15)
• Youtube It Firefox Add-on (4)
• Youtube Comment Cloud Firefox Add-On (4)
• Web Development: Widerbug For Firefox (8)
• Web Browser: Firefox Cache Search (2)

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.

Related posts

• Display Firefox Browsing History With History Tree (15)
• Speed Up Firefox By Limiting The History (5)
• Private Browsing Not So Private After All (13)
• Block Websites From Appearing In Firefox History (11)
• Youtube It Firefox Add-on (4)

Thumbstrips to the rescue. This Firefox add-on peps up the Firefox history function. It adds a toolbar at the bottom of Firefox above the status bar that displays thumbnails of the pages that have been visited recently. The page title and the time of the last visit are displayed as well.

A click on a thumbnail loads that website again immediately. It is possible to change the order of the thumbnails and stop the recording of thumbnails. If you like you can keep thumbnails of ten websites in that bar and use it as a quick load function. Moving the mouse to the right or left end of the screen will scroll the thumbnails automatically in that direction.

The hotkey F2 displays and hides the toolbar which continues to record pages if the recording is still active. Thumbstrips can be saved as well and everyone with the extension may load them. This could be very interesting for a research project for instance.

Found at Tech Malaya and Firefox Mastery

Related posts

• Record and Share your browser history with Hooeey (1)
• If you had to choose five Firefox Add-ons.. (23)
• Hide Menus in Fullscreen with Autohide for Firefox (3)
• Firefox Referrer Control (0)
• Auto Copy Firefox Extension (1)