[Support] Historia

Please post your support questions about Historia here.

Thank you

Great! Thank you.

Suggestions:

  1. Allow full regex.
  2. Option to limit the number of entries for the same URL/pattern. So for example, if I set the max to 20 and visit Reddit homepage, which I already visited hundreds of times, only the 20 most recent visits will stay recorded, the older ones will be excluded to avoid worthless bloating of places.sqlite.
  3. Option to rename Filter Patterns (just change the URL entry in History without actually redirecting the page). Example usage: I’m active in a forum that have direct link to latest post of each thread. The URL link has “offset=last”, but it redirects to the number of the last post, like “offset=348”. I use Link Status Redux addon that displays the last visit time of hovered links. Since the link is “offset=last”, but redirects to “offset=348”, there are no records of “offset=last” in History, so I can’t know my last visit in each thread (unless I manually search in History). If your extension allows me to rename “offset=\d+” (any number) to “offset=last”, the problem will be solved.

Great majority of users will not be programmers to be able to use RegEx. I am a programmer and found that I can easily get by with what is available. :wink:

Possible… maybe… but the Date based should do the job … delete everything and keep the last few days/weeks. The number of items left shouldn’t be that important. :wink:

There is no WebExtension API to rename History items at the moment.

A simple checkbox “Use Regex instead of simplified pattern [only for advanced users]” above filter patterns textarea would hurt so much the basic users? :roll_eyes:

There is limitation with just ^, $, * (.*) and ? (.), even if it works for 95% of the cases.

Date based isn’t triggered automatically, right? And it has just one input, I can’t keep a list of multiple “keywords” to delete all my common visited URLs, I would need a macro for this. :yum:

But if I let as a list of URL/patterns that automatically do the job when matches the current URL… Much more practical.

And I have URLs visited more than 100 times that I haven’t visited in a year, I’m afraid that Date based solution will remove entries that I would like to keep at least one visit for any needs.

OK, I’ll see if I can make a UserScript with history.replaceState.

Grateful for your attention.

At the moment, addon doesn’t have a automatic track and delete function (like delete all older than x days). It only deletes 1 history at the time of creation. (one at time)

Doing what you suggest requires the addon to be constantly checking the history to see how many there are, which can impact the browser performance as history operations are resource intensive. A hung browser is not a pretty sight :wink:

Let’s see how many people would want to have such a feature.

Allowing RegEX would also require checking if the RegEX is valid which makes it more complicated.
Again, if there is a considerable demand for it, I will add the feature.

OK.

I don’t think that this is resource intensive. I’ve just deleted one URL with more than 6.000 visits from my history in less than 2 seconds. This is, by far, the worst scenario for me (my second most visited URL has the half of this number of views).

This little hang should be noticeable only in the most frequent URLs, with hundreds or thousands of views. And this should happen only once for each URL, because in the next time there will be only 20 visits at most and only the oldest will be removed, for sure without any delay.

The intention with this feature is exactly to keep history database efficient without having to clear the history (btw, at the moment my places.sqlite size is 120MB).

Wow. Mine was 65mb :wink:

Keeping a constantly running search and delete means:

  1. Visiting a site, addon has to search for all entries of that site in the data base, sort them and keep the last 20, delete the rest
  2. Meanwhile you visit another site, the same for other site
  3. the same as above for each tab that is opened

Unless the history database is very very small, that will hung the browser. I usually have many tabs open and while a tab is loading, I open other tabs.

There is another issue. The process is asynchronous. If more than one tab have the same domain, then different processes try to search and delete the same domain and it runs into all sorts of error as one found by one process may be deleted by another process and thus when trying to delete, cause an error.

However, if you want to add a keep count to Search from Options page, maybe that is a possibility for the single search being performed at the time.

If there are more demands for it, I will add the feature. :+1:

Love the “Delete 24 hour history” option. Maybe an option to customize that (1 hour, 30 minutes, 3 hours, etc)?

Maybe … :+1: let me work on it :wink:
Update: Done… I have written the code and it will be in the next update… I used 1 hour steps though (1-24)

I have written the code for Auto-Delete older than X days and I am testing it. It will be in the next update v1.1

I wrote the code to delete Download History as well … but … sadly the API is buggy :frowning_face: so I have to postpone it for now.
(https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1387175)

Thanks. To be honest, I wouldn’t use it too regularly: I mean, I would set it to 1 hour and leave it like that permanently (not change the settings much at all).

I see … I wrote it as a selectable each time (not saved)
It would actually be easier to write it as saveable preference :grinning:

Regarding the question if regexps are useful or not: imagine we have two sites (production and test)
http://example.org/
http://example.org:8080/
We need to prevent the following URLs from saving to history:
http://example.org/12345
http://example.org:8080/12345
If we use something like http://example.org*/12345 then we will also include URLs like http://example.org/56789/12345 which is not needed to ban.
There was the similar add-on named “No history” (development was ceased many years ago). It had two separate text boxes - one for wildcards (like * and ?), one for regexps. So majority of users could just use the patterns with wildcards but more experienced users could use the patterns with regexps (in case it is needed).

@Ac1 … I see … OK… that is not a problem. I have already written a similar code for Replace where strings starting and ending in forward slash (i.e./.............../ ) are treated as Regular Expression. (no need for extra boxes :wink: )

In fact, Historia converts the Glob style matching to Regular Expression in order to use.

I will add the Regular Expression support in future updates.

The same approach is used in Adblock Plus (for example), so this definitely will not be anything “new” or “strange” for the users.

Great! Thank you!

@yfdyh000 Historia v1.2 is ready to be uploaded if you want to update the messages.json

Thank you for adding regular expressions support!

There are a couple of very minor spelling errors to report:

  • Toolbar Menu says Filter Host Histroy [History]
  • Options > Delete History > Keyword section says number of result [results]
  • Help > Start and End section says staring [starting] date

Oops … Thank you for letting me know :slight_smile:

There seems to be a bug related to mass deletion.
Tried to remove google.com in the options page (1000 entries, max date - today)
Notification says 1000 entries were found and Historia removes them.
After half a minute, tried the same step (there were over 12000 entries)
Again, notification window said 1000 will be removed. Repeated steps 4-5 times.

Only removes first 1000 entries. After that, nothing changes.

Thank you. I will check it.

1 Like

(post withdrawn by author, will be automatically deleted in 24 hours unless flagged)