History Viewer is a free program for the Windows operating system that reveals what the three browsers Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer, and the Windows operating system, have recorded.

When you first start the program you will notice that entries are divided into four groups in the left side bar. The main area is empty until you click on one of the entries in the sidebar.

Lets take a closer look at each group and the history information it offers:

• Internet Explorer: Displays the url history, text that has been entered into the browser’s address bar, web cookies as well as the contents of the index.dat file.
• Firefox: Lists the url, input and form history, as well as cookies and downloads.
• Google Chrome: Displays the url history, top visited sites, keyword searches, cookies and downloads.
• Microsoft Windows: All recent documents that have been opened, the search, run, open and save, and list visited history, the usb storage device history, first folder information and typed paths.

The listings can reveal plenty of information, for instance which websites have been visited, what the user has been searching for on the Internet, which devices have been plugged into the computer in the past and which files have been downloaded to the local computer.

The program can create a report of its findings which is saved as a plain HTML file on the system. There are no options to delete individual entries or all entries. For that, I suggest to run a program like the free CCleaner which can take care of most of the entries that you see. Keep History Viewer open, run CCleaner and check back in the program if the listings have been removed. You do need to close all supported web browsers if they are running on the system.

History Viewer is compatible with all versions of the Microsoft operating system starting with Windows 98. (via Instant Fundas)

The Online Etymology Dictionary is available for free on the Internet. You can enter a word, or part of a word, a suffix for instance, that you are interested in in the form on the frontpage or start your search with a click on one of the letters of the alphabet.

If you’d enter Etymology for instance you get the following information:

late 14c., ethimolegia “facts of the origin and development of a word,” from O.Fr. et(h)imologie (14c., Mod.Fr. étymologie), from L. etymologia, from Gk. etymologia, properly “study of the true sense (of a word),” from etymon “true sense” (neut. of etymos “true, real, actual,” related to eteos “true”) + -logia “study of, a speaking of” (see -logy). In classical times, of meanings; later, of histories. Latinized by Cicero as veriloquium. As a branch of linguistic science, from 1640s. Related: Etymological; etymologically.

Information usually consists of one or multiple sentences. The related information are unfortunately not displayed as links, which means that you have to manually copy and paste them to perform a search on them.

One of the things that I like to do is to look up suffixes and prefixes, as they can help you get an understanding of a word even if you do know know what it means exactly. The suffix -itis for instance denotes diseases characterized by inflammation.

The etymology dictionary makes a handy bookmark for users who like to look-up word meanings and a word’s history. Just head over to the site and start searching, and maybe share a word you discovered with the rest of us.

Only the search at the top offers some form of customization, as it can be used to find a specific web page that you have visited in the past.

Still, if you do not know that page’s name you are left with no other choice than to scroll down until you find that entry on that page.

The Google Chrome extension History 2 improves the history page significantly.

It adds several controls to the header of the history page. Most noticeable is the time-of-visit filter at the top which allows you to display pages that you have visited on a specific day or time period. By default, only today’s pages and the tabs that were open on browser start are displayed on the page when you open Chrome’s history. You can easily switch to another date or period with a click on one of the available options.

Pages are furthermore sorted by domain, which means that you only see the website’s url in the listing by default which improves visibility. The number of pages in the history are displayed next to the url. A click on the site’s name opens the list of all pages that you have visited on the site.

An option to delete all history for the selected url is displayed below all pages that have been visited, which is another improvement over Google Chrome’s native history page.

The order menu at the top of the screen offers to sort the history not only by the last visiting time, but also alphabetically and by the number of visits.

This has an effect on all date filters on top. All items are then sorted according to the order selection, regardless of the time period.

History 2 is an unobtrusive but handy Chrome extension that improves the history page of the Chrome browser significantly. The extension is available for direct installation at the Chrome Web Store.

Why is the browser recording the history? To give the user a tool at hand to open previously visited websites. Browsers like Firefox integrate the history by default in other parts of the browser. This includes for instance the address bar. Firefox will search the bookmarks and history to display suggestions when the user begins typing in the address bar.

The default options to delete entries from the web browsing history are limited. It is possible to remember the history, or force Firefox to ignore the history.

The Library is the main management tool for the Firefox browsing history and bookmarks. Here it is possible to edit and delete individual history items. But that’s obvious not an optimal solution. The Firefox add-on History Deleter offers a better automated history management solution.

History Deleter basically allows the user to configure history deleting rules for specific pages, domains or titles. The following rules are available:

• Keywords: This matches the keyword to the domain name or page title
• Days visited before: Will only delete history entries if the site has been visited before x days
• Deadlinks: Will only delete links from matching sites if the links are no longer valid
• Visited at least two times: Will only delete items in history if the page has been visited at least twice

The add-on can execute the deletion on Firefox exit, when the history exceeds a certain number of entries or on demand. The rules can be modified for each entry individually. It is for instance possible to configure automatic deletion of entries for specific domains so that they never appear in the history after the browsing session.

The options page offers link checking and statistic generation parameters. Here it is possible to change the link checker interval, the number of concurrent connections or the page fetching interval.

History Deleter offers web browsing statistics of the browsing history. The main purpose of the add-on is however to offer the user a rule based management of the history, in particular better deletion options of individual items.

Some Chrome users may want to access the Chrome browsing history without opening a new tab, and that’s exactly what the Recent History extension for the Chrome browser does.

The extension places an icon in the browser’s address bar that can be clicked on to display the following information:

• Recent History: This is the only option that is enabled by default. The web pages that have been visited recently are displayed when this option is enabled. The default value is 20.
• Recently Closed Tabs: An option to display a number of recently closed tabs.
• Recent Bookmarks: Display a number of bookmarks that have been created recently.
• Most visited: Display the most visited sites.

All information are displayed on a left-click on the extension’s icon in the Chrome address bar.

The number of entries for each supported data set is fully customizable, as is the order of the items in the menu in the web browser.

It is for instance possible to configure the extension to only display the most recent bookmarks, or the recent history and most visited sites.

Additional options are available in the extension’s settings. This includes the width of the menu that is displaying the information, if a search form should be displayed as well or date and time specific settings.

Recent History is a helpful extension for the Chrome browser. The best feature in my opinion is the versatility of it, as users have the option to display one or multiple information in the one click popup menu.

Recent History is available for download at the Google Chrome extension’s gallery.

The option to clear the recent history has been included in Firefox for quite some time, but many Firefox users do not know that this option exists. The Clear Recent History menu becomes available after pressing Ctrl-Shift-Del, or following the Tools > Clear Recent History Path.

The new menu window that opens up displays all kinds of data that can be deleted, and a time range at the top that is often overlooked as it displays Everything by default.

clear recent history

A click on the pull down menu however reveals time ranges that can be selected, for instance the last hour, two hours or four hours.

To pick a harmless example. Say you have decided to shop for a birthday present for a household member. Instead of using the private browsing mode you could simply use the browser as normal, and open the Clear Recent History menu afterwards to delete all data that has been accumulated in the last x hours so that it becomes impossible to retrace the last browsing session.

The scripts are currently able to test more than 200K URLs per minute which should be enough to create a solid profile of nearly any web user.

Some factors mitigate the problem like clearing the history regularly.

The Mozilla developers have now come up with a solution for the problem that applies three changes to the way links are styled in the web browser.

The Mozilla blog has a fairly long article up with technical details as does David Baron whose solution was picked to plug the CSS History leak in the web browser.

It is not yet clear when this will make its way into the Firefox web browser but it is likely that it will be implemented soon.

Users who do not want to wait can protect their computer’s from the leak by setting “layout.css.visited_links_enabled option in about:config to false” which however has the consequence that no visited styling is displayed whatsoever in the web browser.

Users of all web browsers who want to test what a script could find out about their surfing habits can visit the Start Panic website

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.

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.

Some webmasters use this method to display the social bookmarking and news batches of websites that their visitors have been through which is very effective in gaining popularity on those websites.

Others came up with a script that is using this method to estimate if the visitor is male or female. The Javascript makes use of the Quantcast Top 10K websites and the male:female ratio that they provide plus a neat algorithm to compute the percentages for male and female likeliness.

Mine turned out 50/50 because I don’t use the history at all. Good luck and let me know what the script thinks about your gender..

The same principle could possible be used to display targeted advertisements. Have been to a lot of parenting websites lately? How about parenting ads? Like sports? How about an ESPN subscription? It’s a bit scary, don’t you think?

One sector that was a bit neglected until now was documentaries. Best Online Documentaries is a website that tries to change that. They offer nearly 650 documentaries embedded in their website that are hosted on servers like Google Video or Youtube. Viewers can watch the documentaries online on their website.

Several categories like Biographies, History, Science and Mystery and numerous subcategories make it easy to find what you are interested in. All the videos that I tested worked and have a playing time of 40+ minutes. The language is English. Below is one of the videos that you can find on the website. You could really spend several days there.