Auditing Firefox’s history (for good or for evil)
It came across my plate to be able to export and view firefox’s browsing history and it took me a good 30 minutes of research on how to do it so I am placing it all here to save someone else some time.
Prior to firefox 3 history was stored in the profile folder under history.dat. That was apparently stored in some format called Mork. Apparently it was a real pain and poorly documented and just reading the “Criticism” section on the Wikipedia (and following the citation) I had lost hope of viewing the history.
Until I read that Firefox 3 uses a places.sqlite file (MozStorage) and I realized the version of Firefox I was using was 3.
You think the next step is me writing something to read this? I don’t write anything, except maybe this blog. I pay people or check to make sure the wheel was invented. Sorry to disappoint!
I found this piece of free software to view both history.dat and places.sqlite files and allow me to view Firefox history- even seeing how long a user was at a website! It exports into a human readable format, although the impact that someone spent 2 hours on eBay isn’t in the text file you export it still gives you an idea that they visited that site 35 times, which is significant enough.
Read the documentation carefully as it appears I was able to view Firefox 3 places.sqlite because I had Firefox 3 installed on my machine.
Before finding that I was led to here which had the Dork reader linked but I couldn’t use it. However the article and information was very helpful in my search so I am providing it here.
I found this link about Web Browser forensics (why does the IT person always have porn and pirated stuff?) while browsing that caught my interest – bookmarked for a later read.
Popularity: 32% [?]
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