Display Firefox Browsing History With History Tree

The default Firefox history manager is not very comfortable to work with. The information that it displays are mediocre at best even if the the browsing history is displayed in the sidebar.
Firefox displays the domain name and the page of each domain that has been visited. It does not however display information about the time the websites were visited or their relation.
Update: Firefox sorts the history by time period now so that you can access sites visited in a certain time period such as the current day, the last week or a specific month of the year. It is however still not listing the actual time of the day a website was visited. The extension reviewed below is unfortunately no longer available and there is no comparable add-on available that offers the same feature set.
That's where the new Firefox add-on History Tree comes into play. History Tree generates a tree structure from the Firefox history in real-time. 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 displays a preview screenshot of the selected website on the same screen while a click on the triangle hides sub-pages from the display and replaces them with a number representing their count instead. 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 you in finding information in the history faster.
It is furthermore possible to change the tree view to a thumbnail view of 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 does not 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 a default action associated to a left-click on a thumbnail or box in the History Tree window so that users could open sites with just one click instead of having to use with the selection box all the time.
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Still waiting for that promised version of History Tree for Linux (deb) to test !…
Henri
Hi Jocko,
You can download History Tree from the official Firefox add-on site at;
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13316/
hey dummy you still hiding the links to download?
Thankyou Mark and Jane.
I tried New Tab King and its a good add-on which is very useful.
However, History Tree has very different functionality to NTK
I think that lots of users would like to have both of these add-on’s
and that some user’s might even have half a dozen history add-on’s on the same computer! (I know I do)
no doubt this is cool, and it seems like a pro’s hands are behind History Tree.
Still, I don’t see this becoming something practical to work with. I have enough history information, including domain drill-down with New Tab King. More importantly, NTK is designed to help me reach these sites while showing up on each new tab. I
I simply don’t understand why this level of my history analysis is necessary.
Mark J
This may be the best history add-on for Firefox.
I am not inclined to keeping history too long and for the
times I want to review it I created a bookmark to the
chrome url for history which offers several views
to order and review one’s Firefox history with
one click access to any site listed there.
chrome://browser/content/history/history-panel.xul
Any idea where this can be downloaded? The link mentioned for download doesn’t show anything now. The creator’s web site (http://normansolomon.org.uk) is also down. If it is no longer available on firefox extensions gallery, can someone upload the copy they downloaded for sharing? You can post files you wish to share to one.ubuntu.com, dropbox.io, or other similar sites.
Great tip about the chrome history panel. Works for me! Thx.
Really cool add-on!
I worked now a few hours with it and i am starting to (really) enjoy it this because its much more handy, visual than the original (much more simple) with FireFox supplied version.