See How Often You Visit Web Sites in Firefox 3

One of Firefox 3’s newest (and most revealing) backend features is its built-in usage tracking—it keeps a running tally of how often you visit a web page over a period of time, which informs the Smart Location Bar’s suggestions and creates things like smart bookmark lists of “Most Visited” sites. Smarter features informed by your behaviour are great, but checking out the raw data can offer a whole lot of insight into where and how you spend your time online. Exactly what site have you visited the most since you installed Firefox 3 and how many times did you go there? Here’s how to find out.

The numbers are in your browser history. In Firefox 3, from the History Menu, choose “Show All History.” Then, in the History list, right-click on a column title, and check off “Visit Count.” Then you can sort the web pages you’ve hit since the last time your history got cleared by frequency of visits by just clicking the Visit column title. (My actual numbers are a bit embarrassing and include private URLs, so here’s the info from a test installation of Firefox.)

If you want to quickly see how often you’ve visited the site you’re currently on, click on its icon to the left of the URL, then the “More Information…” button, which will show you something like this:

Here’s where your reload obsession with Slashot and goodness-knows-what-else stares you in the face, mocking you and your unproductive inadequacy. So? How bad is your Lifehacker addiction? Are we in your top five most-visited sites? Tell us how many times you’ve visited us since you installed Firefox 3 in the comments.