Better History

Search, filter, and clean up your browser history with full-text search, date presets, bulk deletion, URL rules, and scheduled cleanup options.

Better History adds fast search, bulk cleanup, and automatic history rules to Chrome and Firefox. History stays in the browser; the extension has no backend, analytics, or telemetry.

Search and browse

Open the extension from the browser toolbar. Search your history by text, use date-range presets to narrow results, and select multiple entries when you want to remove them together. Chrome also opens the full history interface when you visit the browser’s History page; in Firefox, open the full interface from the extension action.

Protect or remove sites automatically

Use URL patterns to create a blacklist for entries that should be removed automatically, or a whitelist for entries that should be kept. Scheduled cleanup can run when the browser closes or on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule. Choose a retention period to control how much history remains.

Download the latest release

The download links always redirect to the latest stable release for this extension.

Install a local build

Clone the source repository and install its dependencies with bun install.
From the repository root, run bun run prepare:wxt.
Run bun run --filter better-history build.
In Chrome, open chrome://extensions, enable Developer mode, select Load unpacked, and choose apps/better-history/.output/chrome-mv3.
In Firefox, open about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox, choose Load Temporary Add-on, and select apps/better-history/.output/firefox-mv3/manifest.json.

Permissions and privacy

Better History uses the history, sessions, tabs, storage, unlimitedStorage, contextMenus, alarms, and activeTab permissions to search and manage history, keep settings, and schedule cleanup. Chrome additionally uses favicon to show site icons. History and settings are processed locally. No analytics, telemetry, backend, or remote API is used.

Troubleshooting

The extension doesn’t appear: confirm the selected folder contains manifest.json; use the browser-specific output folder above.
A scheduled cleanup didn’t run: check that the extension remains enabled and review the schedule and retention settings.
A pattern does not match: compare it with the URL in the history entry and simplify the pattern to isolate the mismatch.

See the Better History source and release notes.