Google Chrome to get history grouping feature

Google Chrome like any other web browser out there keeps a record of the website and services a user has visited in the past. The main idea behind the web history is to provide users with a way to look up previously visited websites and services, which comes in handy if the web address or title can't be remembered anymore.

You can access Google Chrome's history on the chrome://history/ page directly, by using the Ctrl-H keyboard shortcut or with a click on Settings > History. Here you find a list of previously visited websites in chronological order. Each site is listed with the date and time it has been visited, the page title, and the domain name. The button behind each listing offers to filter results by the site, or to remove the entry from history.

If you visit a lot of sites during a browsing session, or many pages of the same site, you may have noticed that the history for that particular day growth quite large, that you sometimes need to scroll down multiple pages to reach the end of the listing.

Google recently added a new feature to Chromium which has also found its way into Chrome Canary and likely Dev as well. The new feature allows you to group history items of the same domain to reduce the length of the history listing.

The feature at the time of writing needs to be activated with a launch parameter. Here is what you need to do to enable it on Windows:

• Right-click the Chrome shortcut in the taskbar or start menu and select properties from the context menu.
• Append --enable-grouped-history at the end of the target line, make sure a space is between the path and the parameter.
• Relaunch Google Chrome

You should now see a new Group domains option on the history page (top right corner) that you can enable to group all history items by domain. You will notice that all same-domain entries are grouped into a single entry on the history page after activation which may shorten the length of the page considerable. Note that subdomains are seen as different domains by the group domain feature.

If everything goes according to plans, group domains will make its way from development versions of the browser all the way down to the stable version of Chrome. While it is likely that it will take months before that is happening, it is not the only history related update that Chrome users can look forward to as the team is currently also integrating time-based filters on the history page.

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