CRX id
gfmbnlbnapjmffgcnbopfgmflmlfghel
gfmbnlbnapjmffgcnbopfgmflmlfghel
Description from extension meta
Search your full browsing history
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Description from store
Search everything you've seen in your browser. Full Text Tabs Forever (FTTF) is a powerhouse tool for navigating your browsing history.
**Doesn't Chrome do that already? How is this different?**
Chrome does not let you search the text on pages you've visited, only the URLs/titles, and it deletes your history after a number of months.
FTTF is different:
- **Full-Text Search Capabilities:** The full content of every page you've visited becomes searchable, ensuring that no piece of information ever slips through the cracks.
- **Permanent History:** Your digital footprints are yours to keep. Your data is yours, so it should not be removed without your approval. Nothing is deleted automatically.
- **Instant indexing:** FTTF creates a search index as you browse, so pages are immediately available for searching right after you land on a page.
- **For your eyes only:** Your browsing history is stored locally on your device, and not on any external servers. Beware that if you switch computers your FTTF history will not automatically come with you. It can be exported though.
**Who is it for?**
Data hoarders like myself that never want to delete anything, and want everything to be searchable. More generally, if you've ever felt limited by the standard history search you should try this out.
**How it works:**
Chrome extensions have access to the pages you visit, which lets FTTF make an index of the content on any page. When a page loads its content is extracted and indexed.
Extracted? Yes, or "distilled" if you prefer. Full web pages are huge and have a lot of information that's not related to the content itself. FTTF will ignore all of that. It acts like "reader mode" to find relevant content on a page and only index that.
**Open Source:** This extension is fully open source. You can find the MIT-licensed source code here: https://github.com/iansinnott/full-text-tabs-forever
Latest reviews
- (2025-06-01) K H: Love this, a life saver, I've been wanting something like this for YEARS! I'd give this 5 stars even without the extra wishlist features/niggles (like, if only it would do PDFs in Chrome too), that I will be raising separately. An absolute must-have if you do a lot of research/looking stuff up online, only to spend ages trying to find something again later! Edit - it stopped working, a day after I started using it, so have changed it to 3 stars! I'll try the support page, and see... Further edit - the updated version now works, back up to 5 stars! The issue was that the previous version couldn't cope with a big database, I believe, but the new version can. And also shows the date saved in the results list.
- (2024-12-13) Barney Pitt: The indexing seems to work perfectly. However I have three complaints about the search functionality. Firstly, it attempts to be clever and gives me matches it thinks are related to the search term. This works terribly. For example, a search for "residency" gave me 60 "hits" 56 of which were false-positives, (resident, residual [why ?!] , residences, residential, etc.). A "Verbatim" checkbox really needs to be added (sticky between uses). And even when not verbatim, the current "related" words functionality is too lenient. Secondly I don't much like the very verbose format, which lists every single line in which a search term (or "variant"!) occurs, so in some cases there are only 2 hits per page. I think this should be limited to 2 lines maximum (like Google does). Better still would be a "verbose" checkbox (sticky between uses) to toggle between the current maximal view and a minimal view which has only no matching lines (like chrome history search), or maybe just one matching line. Thirdly, there is no "Visited" date provided. For me this is an absolutely fundamental requirement to a history search. I would prefer it to behave like chrome history search, with time as a fixed width column, and "separator" lines between different dates. This could be a really nice extension with these features.
- (2024-01-05) Tom Kersten: Works as expected. Big improvement over the default of only links/titles. Great job.