When you’re trying to remember that important URL you visited yesterday then viewing your browser’s history will probably provide the details you need. But if you’ve more than one browser installed then it could still take quite some time to trawl through your previous online sessions.
Fortunately there’s now a simpler option in the shape of BrowsingHistoryView, the latest NirSoft release, which presents your Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari histories all in a single table.
And so in a click you can be viewing a report of your online activities, detailing each URL, page title, the time visited and number of visits. The report can be sorted by any of these attributes, too, so clicking the column header for “Visit Time”, say, will quickly reveal the sites you’ve visited last.
BrowsingHistoryView displays all your browser histories in a single, searchable report
The nature of browser histories means that this list may not be as straightforward as you like. There’s not always just a single line for a web page visited, for instance: there may be other entries relating to authentication, ads, scripts, favicons, downloaded files, and the list goes on.
The program’s Find tool can help you track down what you need, though. If you remember that the URL you’re looking for was on Microsoft’s site, say, then searching for “Microsoft” will pull up all matching addresses.
And you can also filter the report by excluding particular browsers, selecting a time period you’d like to examine – 7:00am to 10:30am yesterday, for instance – or defining the Windows user profile which you’d like BrowsingHistoryView to examine (the current user, All Users, a specified profile and more).
There’s clearly scope for some improvement here. Opera support would be great, for example. Support for portable browsers would be useful, too. And we’d also like a few filters to help remove the junk from the report. The ability to display only http: or https: entries, say, would be very helpful.
BrowsingHistoryView is already a very useful, tool, though, compact (<350KB), portable, and able to run on anything from Windows 2000 through to 8. And, of course, it’s only the first version – we’ve no doubt that Nir Sofer will enhance and improve the program in the future.
This article originally appeared at softwarecrew.co.uk
