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andrew_eu | 5 months ago

I've used probably 15 or 20 web browsers in my lifetime and all of them had the same barely searchable table of URLs as their only history view. Why couldn't we have full text search of the pages, or a view that reflects tab histories as some kind of graph, or UIs that support any kind of sorting? Instead it's 2025 and the solution is to attach an LLM slot machine to the front and drive engagement.

I'd be very open to any Firefox extension suggestions (or standalone applications that can consume a Firefox history) that makes it more searchable. I don't often need to search my browser history, but when I do the answer is rarely easy to find.

All of the other features look like a high potential for abuse, but with lots of glitz to make it seem essential to laymen.

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bananaflag|5 months ago

The Firefox Awesome Bar, since spring of 2008, has been quite better than anything else, you could search any fragment of the page title and the results showed up by frecency. Curiously, Chrome's omnibox came out later that year and is still worse.

rdsubhas|5 months ago

There were many discussions about this in HN too, and the general conclusion was Google wanted to force more Google searches, and the large general users of Chrome were fine with it.

kristopolous|5 months ago

or when you go to chrome's history and it just lists the title of the page followed by simply the domain. It's like "some designer thought the pages feng shui wasn't in alignment and now the useful stuff is gone."

I have to assume they just hire artists that have never used a computer to make UX decisions and act as product dictators.

It's either that or empiricism by idiots: "We made the feature take 5x more time to use and got a 5x increase in engagement! Won't my boss be proud!?"