chrome access browser history

Question

I'm trying to access my browser history in chrome, using a browser action with a popup page.

var histories = [];
var visits = [];

chrome.history.search({'text':'', 'maxResults':0}, function(historyItems){
    for(var h in historyItems){
        histories.push({'id': h.id, 'url':h.url});
    }
});

for(var h in histories){
    chrome.history.getVisits({'url': h.url, function(visitItems){
        for(var v in visitItems){
            var id = v.id;
            var visitId = v.visitId;
            var visitTime = v.visitTime;
            var referringVisitId = v.referringVisitId;
            var transition = v.transition;
            visits.push({'id': v.id, 'visitId': v.visitId, 'visitTime': v.visitTime, 'referringVisitId': v.referringVisitId, 'transition':v.transition});
        }
    });
}

console.log(histories.length + ' histories');
console.log(visits.length + ' visits');

I get 234 histories and 0 visits as a result. How can I have a bunch of pages with no visits? What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

The reason why your code doesn't work is the asynchronous nature of the calls to chrome.history.

You are actually attempting to iterate through histories[] BEFORE chrome.history.search returns. This means that histories[] at that point is still an empty array. Does the console.log at the end indeed print out more than 0 histories? Anyway, it's a racing condition at this point.

What you need to do is call chrome.history.getVisits inside the callback function from chrome.history.search.

Here's one way to do it:

var histories = [];
var visits = [];

chrome.history.search({text:'', maxResults:0}, function(historyItems) {
    var historiesProcessed = 0;
    for (var i = 0; i < historyItems.length; i++) {
        histories.push(historyItems[i]);
        chrome.history.getVisits({url: historyItems[i].url}, function(visitItems) {
            for (var i = 0; i < visitItems.length; i++) {
                visits.push(visitItems[i]);
            }
            historiesProcessed++;
            if (historiesProcessed === historyItems.length) {
                console.log(visits.length + ' visits');
            }
        });
    }
    console.log(histories.length + ' histories');
});

It's not the prettiest code but it works and you can refactor it to look nicer.

I'm not sure you can access chrome.history inside a popup page (let me know when you test it), but it'll definitely work from the background page and you can pass the results to the popup.

Answer 2

The problem is, this does not work anymore inside webkit (chrome, safari ea). It's absence (traversing the visits) fixes a security-bug which exposes the visited links to any website. With some random guessing it was possible to track and profile visitors, which was considered a privacy-breach.

Answer 3

There's an extension called ClickHint that presents statistics about visited sites and pages, including the number of visits and the amount of time spent on each page. As far as I know, it takes a from-this-point-forward approach: It compiles the stats after you've installed the extension and only while it is enabled. Perhaps this method will work for you as well.

Answer 4

chrome.history.search({
'text': '',              // Return every history item....
'startTime': oneWeekAgo  // that was accessed less than one week ago.
   },
   function(historyItems) {
       console.log(historyItems);
       document.write(JSON.stringify(historyItems))
  });

This will just give the visitCount