172391 - Support for browser-history tool on X/unix versions

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: History: Global, enhancement)

Description

[michael stutz]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; N; Linux 2.4.5 i686; en-US) Mozilla/m13
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; N; Linux 2.4.5 i686; en-US) Mozilla/m-13





Currently, Mozilla lack support for a classic web-history tool for use in X.
Adding support for this tool is trivial and described later in this report.

The 'browser-history' tool [1] is a simple utility for maintaining a
reverse-chronological list of visited URLs that works independent of
browser. (So a single history file is updated even when using multiple
browsers.)

I know that Mozilla has its own history feature but browser-history
is a venerable tool with an excellent file format. Some people have saved their
browser-history files accumulating over many years with other browsers and it
would be very convenient to continue using it with Mozilla.

It would be simple to add support for this tool in Mozilla;
all that is necessary is adding an XA_STRING X property called
BROWSER_HISTORY_INFO, with an sprintf string of "URL=%s\0TITLE=%s\0\0" in it.

More complete instructions for doing this are on the browser-history page noted
below.

Thanks for considering this feature request. This minor enhancement would enable
me to make mozilla my full-time browser and I look forward to that.

1. http://koala.ilog.fr/colas/browser-history/



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Execute "browser-history &" and then "mozilla"
2. Visit a web page with mozilla


Actual Results:  
Look at the file ~/.browser-history/history-log.html and see that the page you
visited did not appear.


Expected Results:  
Visited pages should be written to the history-log file.


This would be trivial to implement and as a feature would convert me to Mozilla
completely. Thanks for considering it.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Be very careful with this - I used to work for the European Commission in
Brussels, and I've had reports that 'some people' were using this to spy on
people's browsing habits (using Netscape on Unix). I'm not joking. This has been
used as spyware (the real thing - I don't have to explain who those people
were). We had contact back then with Netscape, and they explained this feature
to us. Almost nobody knew that it existed.

Ofcourse, the real solution is to disallow xhost-access, encrypting
history-files, wiping out history-files on a regular basis, better
host-security, etc ... There a million other things that have to be changed
before you can make a true safe browser (for a start, you'll have to start
encrypting all profile-data, and supporting IPSEC everywhere). But please don't
enable this without asking permission on the user !

Comment 2

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

cc'ing some people who do gtk stuff

Comment 3

[Kenneth Herron]

I can't seem to find a dupe for this. Approving as an RFE.

You realize, of course, that the best chance for this to be implemented is for
some browser-history user to do the implementation.

Comment 4

[webmaster]

Why, after 15 years, was this bug marked "resolved" when nothing was ever done about it?

To this day the mozilla browser history is deficient ... it's not greppable, it actually deletes user data when it runs out of memory, this tool would be a simple solution ... anyone have a good explanation here?