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Javascript – Accessing history in chromium browsers through extensions API

I’m currently developing an extension that will provide a better alternative to standard Edge history page. For accessing the history I used chrome.history, which, as I previously thought, solved my problem. However, as I increased maxResults property of the query, at some point it just stopped returning more results (around a 100, I definitely have more than 100 history items), from which I concluded that it only returns the items that were added after the last launch of the browser. I comfirmed that by restarting the browser and saw an empty result. Currently, I’m using this piece of code to get history items:

function displayHistory(items, filter, main) {
    items.processingDone = false;
    chrome.history.search(
        {
            text: filter,
            maxResults: 1000
        },
        (history) => {
            undisplayAll(items, main);
            for (const i of history) {
                displayItem(items, i, main);
            }
            items.processingDone = true;
        }
    );
}

The question is: How to access the whole history?

Tags:

2

Answers


  1. 0

    You could try promisifying the API call:

    function fetchHistoryPage(startTime, endTime, pageSize) {
  return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
    chrome.history.search({
      text: '',
      startTime: startTime,
      endTime: endTime,
      maxResults: pageSize
    }, function(results) {
      if (chrome.runtime.lastError) {
        reject(chrome.runtime.lastError);
      } else {
        resolve(results);
      }
    });
  });
}

    And then implement a paging call:

    const MILLIS_PER_DAY = 1_000 * 60 * 60 * 24;

let pageSize = 100; // items per page
let currentPage = 0;

async function getNextPage() {
  let now = Date.now();
  let startTime = now - (currentPage + 1) * MILLIS_PER_DAY; // 1 day earlier
  let endTime = now - currentPage * MILLIS_PER_DAY;

  try {
    let results = await fetchHistoryPage(startTime, endTime, pageSize);
    if (results.length) {
      currentPage++; // Only when there are results
      return results;
    } else {
      console.log('No more history items.');
    }
  } catch (error) {
    console.error('Error fetching history:', error);
  }
  return null;
}

    Here is how you can use it:

    (async () => {
  const allResults = [];
  let results;
  
  do {
    results = await getNextPage();
    if (results) {
      allResults.push(...results);
    }
  } while(results);

  // Do something with allResults
})();
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  2. 0

    Even though I can get more history items than the number from current session, chrome.history seems to retrieve far less items than my actual counts of entire browsing history. According to https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40229042#comment16, it seems to be a problem that hasn’t been fixed yet, but they didn’t mention anything about "current session".

    I suggest you create a new post there to let the Dev Team know about the problem, both the old one from back in the day and the new one you just found.

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