Norwell History Tools

Author(s):

trumpai

When first using Norwell open customize panel and drag norwell H icon to the toolbar.

It's hard to explain in a few words, but firefox doesn't have browsing history where history is displayed as time-line. Firefox displays it in such way that multiple visits to sites are displayed only once (the last visit). This makes firefox history look like it's no longer a log, but just useless censored collection of urls even though all the data is collected and stored. It makes it impossible to perform even simple investigative task like looking up where and when you might got infected with malware. What is sad part is that all modern internet browsers do the same thing or even worse... Norwell helps you reclaim history that has been taken from you and replaced with something reminiscent of "Memento" movie.

You can use norwell history tools to import history records from firefox native places.sqlite file or from google chrome/chromium history file into your current profile history. Combine history from different firefox or google chrome profiles. It will omit duplicates so you can use it as sync or append tool.

Norwell doesn't interfere, touch or modify firefox internal routines or existing history database. It only displays already existing data differently.

Referer, browsing breadcrumbs, clicked links info is limited to the peculiarities of firefox - it's far from complete and truthful representation of your Internet history. It will vary according to different factors like installed extensions, link type being clicked, how the link is being opened, content being viewed and how it's being viewed. So you have to be cautious even when using norwell.

Firefox deletes your history automatically. To circumvent this use Expire history by days extension. Ironically author of that extension is the one responsible for implementing such policy in firefox. Update 2016 May 05: At the same time it can't really be trusted - I caught firefox deleting history where I saved some pakistan navy procurement urls in webarchive and now i discovered that those urls that i had browsed myself few weeks before have been wiped from my own local history. Local history of browsing webarchive was left intact. It appears there are way more sinister things going on with this history issue
There are major issues that prevent firefox from having session that can be used as coherent guide in the future. DragIT and Tab Utilities will help with retaining tab session history, Dragit seems to be a better performing in this area, but not without complications. Another addon that improves browsing history comprehension is Google search link fix.
All named anchors will break browsing history timeline (referrer info): like modern web2, web3 interfaces, gmail, search engine redirects or wikipedia internal linkage.
Another instance where firefox makes your history very confusing is that it uses only one title for multiple visits to same url. Say you visit CNN daily and it's title changes daily, but firefox edits this url title every single time so if you look at visit to CNN from year ago you will see todays title.
Soft hyphens (invisible, non printable character) is another issue that might prevent you from finding your history entry even if you know exactly how it is called. Some sites, newsletters, email publishers, etc use this technique. So you are not crazy if you can't find that entry in native firefox history viewer. i used in this paragraph probably 100 of soft hyphens
It looks like that If you have a web page open for more than 20 minutes and you click a link on that page firefox will register it as coming from nowhere
if domain is not reachable/unavailable/expired firefox doesn't log it and you will not be able to find such visits in history as if your actions never happened

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