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See How Often You Visit Web Sites in Firefox 3
Posted by Gina Trapani at 9:00 PM on June 20, 2008
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.
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
zarathustra
Posted 11:32 PM 20/6/08
Someone needs to write a porn-hiding addon for Firefox. Now more than ever. My address bar doesn't look to "awesome" now :(
zarathustra
baest
Posted 11:24 PM 20/6/08
Looks like only 30 :(
baest
guyfromtrinidad
Posted 11:48 PM 20/6/08
One thing I would suggest is that you use a master password with FF3 or even ff2 as it is very easy for prying eyes to see your saved passwords for a particular site using this dialog box.
BTW 25 times in one day
guyfromtrinidad
wickedcupofjoe
Posted 11:47 PM 20/6/08
Google is #1 at 18. Lifehacker is #2 at 15. :)
wickedcupofjoe
lilkeith7
Posted 11:47 PM 20/6/08
Looks like I'm at 132 times. I guess I should find something constructive to do with all that time, but oh well I'm just to lazy.
lilkeith7
GiveMeBreak
Posted 10:18 PM 20/6/08
The one with maximum visit for me is of course, LifeHacker
GiveMeBreak
bdawg923
Posted 12:48 AM 21/6/08
44 times!
bdawg923
vicbel
Posted 12:43 AM 21/6/08
Another great thing about this ...
If you tag an entry on your history, and then delete the history or entries for that domain; the entry you tagged remains linked to the tag. In other words, you can tag your history entries as an alternatives to bookmarking. then just search using your tags.
vicbel
Dustin Meadows
Posted 12:36 AM 21/6/08
@zarathursta - Stealther Fox: [addons.mozilla.org]
I'm not a big fan of this "feature". Its one thing to have the history available. Its another to have that much of it available at will.
What was the default in FF2 on how long to keep in history? Wasn't it 2 weeks? FF3 is now 90 days.
Yep, back to boring bar.
Dustin Meadows
vicbel
Posted 12:33 AM 21/6/08
This is insane!! what a great tool. This "library" gives you so much more than just the visit count. THe search is good, you can tag your history links! You can delete entries ... etc ...
Here is an idea for the extension Gurus ... how about an extension that lets you determine what sites are recorded in your history. Does anything like that exist?
vicbel
zkam
Posted 1:40 AM 21/6/08
35 times for me, but that isn't an accurate representation, since I do most of the reading through Google Reader (which is at 223).
I like the "More Information", with features for blocking images and clearing cookies/passwords on a site-by-site basis.
zkam
the menace
Posted 1:32 AM 21/6/08
35 times for me.
the menace
andrewheiss
Posted 2:22 AM 21/6/08
Weird - in the history section it says I've visited LH 198 times while in the address bar it says 598 (I've been using FF3 since beta 2)
andrewheiss
vor0nwe
Posted 2:20 AM 21/6/08
Well.. The lifehacker.com home page doesn't show up in my history, since I always access the articles from my Netvibes start page via one of my Google Reader tag feeds.
If I do a search on lifehacker, though, I get 124 items (with a total visit count of 134).
Does anybody whether it's possible to group visits by domain, or something?
Netvibes counts 163 visits, BTW, and GMail (in its various incarnations) 471. :-)
RTM!, todoist and Google Calendar don't show up since I've got those running separately in Prism.
vor0nwe
MikeWas
Posted 2:06 AM 21/6/08
Sites with auto-refresh totally FUBAR the count. I left a window open to MSNBC.com last week when Tim Russert died - it auto-refreshed 125 times in one day.
MikeWas
Nu Digi
Posted 3:15 AM 21/6/08
Lifehacker is low...
Compare to my own e-mail box, facebook, myspace and Netvibes.
Damn, I need a hobby. :)
Nu Digi
moffattz
Posted 3:08 AM 21/6/08
49 times
moffattz
j0hnnyb
Posted 5:31 AM 21/6/08
This feature is useless for me since 18 of the top 20 sites are various URLs within Google Reader.
j0hnnyb
itskrishnan
Posted 5:52 AM 21/6/08
Firefox 3 and 2 are reported vulnerable, what you think about that ?
itskrishnan
geekblake
Posted 7:27 AM 21/6/08
I clear my browsing history frequently but in the last, like, 10 or 15 minutes I had 4 visits to Lifehacker pages, plus 6 Google Reader pages where I was reading articles from the Lifehacker feed.
geekblake
Al Iguana
Posted 7:24 AM 21/6/08
this might be offtopic, but has anyone noticed there is a limit to the number of sites you can stay logged in to? I visit say 10 sites a day. I'm automatically logged into them. If I sign up to another site, and have that one log in, then I'm logged out of one of my 10 sites, I have to log in again. If I sign up to three new sites, I'm logged out of three of my regular 10. Does that make sense? Does anyone know if there is a config setting in FF that sets the number of site logons that are remembered? It's set too low imo (same thing in FF2. I guess it's a security measure, but it bugs the hell out of me.) Sorry for going O/T
Al Iguana
always
Posted 6:17 AM 21/6/08
If you run greasemonkey, there is a service over at [habitualknowledge.net] that lets you view your web broswing habits trends. Supposedly it can also match you to other people with similar habits.
always
simmo
Posted 1:27 PM 21/6/08
So far all its telling me is that i am a google whore; gmail and greader...
simmo
xenith
Posted 3:36 PM 21/6/08
oh thats a good feature. the only reason i do not use ff3 is because of betterflickr extension, it doesnt work on it. hehe. heavily use it.
hope you update it soon :D
xenith
antoonvdr
Posted 1:09 AM 24/6/08
FF3 is not counting anything on my PC. What settings could influence that??
antoonvdr