Ubuntu – How to get a proper Firefox History view

browserconfigurationcustomizationfirefoxlog

I have noticed that unlike in other browsers, in Firefox there is no proper History view as such, because the only way to get a history in the right order is to set it on Most Recent Viewed (if you go Menu > History > Show All History) but that still means that if at 17:45 I go to askubuntu.com, then if I go there again at 18:55 I will never be able to see at what time previously I went there.

And I will only be able to see the last time I went to that page, now for some (although I don't know how) this might be more efficient in some way or just better, but for me it really is not, so is there a way of viewing the full history properly where I can see all the times that I have gone to the same page and not just the most recent? Or is this a feature which I will have to request in Firefox (Google Chrome has this feature)?

Just to clarify: I want to make it so that each visit to each individual page gets a new individual entry in the history view instead of it overriding the previous entry about me visiting that page.


OS Information:

No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 15.04
Release:    15.04
Codename:   vivid
Flavour: GNOME
GNOME Version: 3.16

Package Information:

firefox:
  Installed: 40.0.3+build1-0ubuntu0.15.04.1
  Candidate: 40.0.3+build1-0ubuntu0.15.04.1
  Version table:
 *** 40.0.3+build1-0ubuntu0.15.04.1 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ vivid-updates/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ vivid-security/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     37.0+build2-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ vivid/main amd64 Packages

Best Answer

According to this mozillazine page the history for the browser is stored in places.sqlite file in the profiles folder (.mozilla/firefox/ on Ubuntu.)

So, I pulled that file up and took a look at the tables within the database. Within the moz_places table there is a column last_visit_date which provides you with an Unix time/Epoch time number.

However, there are no other columns that provide a number for initial visit and thus no way to provide a true browser history other than the one that Firefox themselves provide.

TL;DR: As far as I can tell by looking at the Firefox SQLite files, there is no way to get a full history other than the one the browser provides.

EDIT: I have created a basic Firefox addon that will write the date & time (in Unix/Epoch format) along with the page title and page URL to the firefoxHistory file in your home directory.

The code is available on this github gist.

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