Chrome browser supports extensions and there is a whole marketplace of Chrome extensions, both free and paid. The extensions extend out-of-the-box capabilities of the Chrome browser.

Do you use Chrome browser extensions? (What are your favorites? Please write to me.)

I need a bunch of them for my day job of software development – read screen coordinates, color picker, smart Auto-refresh, etc. But there are other extensions that are useful in general for productivity. Instapaper is a very important extension for me. Grammarly extension provides nice support during writing. The one that I am going to talk more about is browser history extensions.

Chrome browser, out of the box, provides very basic functionality related to managing browsing history. Thus, it is natural that there are a few extensions available to fill that gap. Primarily these extensions provide the following features:

  1. Capability to search in your browsing history
  2. Go to a specific date (and even time) and check out the details of browsing.
  3. Delete some clutter if you want to (you may need it once in a while if not routinely).

Here are some interesting ways in which we can use the browser history function:

  1. If you want to locate some interesting page that you had visited once but missed to bookmark it. You could search by keywords to find it. Or if you know the date, you could go and easily locate it.
  2. If you are in habit of writing a journal, you can use the history to fill the missing pieces in your journal.
  3. Since anyway we spend most of our time in the browser, it creates a nice log of our daily work. Each history entry goes with a specific time. Thus, one could use it as a time logger. This time log will be of great help whenever you want to study where your time goes and to replan your work schedule.

It’s also interesting to watch the wide gaps in history to see if they are there for valid reasons. It cannot be called a precise logger, but the beauty is that it is automatic.

As of writing, the best extension is Better history https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/better-history/egehpkpgpgooebopjihjmnpejnjafefi This extension has all the above capabilities and has a pleasing graphics user interface.

Install the history extension and use it for its productivity benefits!

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