history

Use the history API to interact with the browser history.

Note that downloads are treated as HistoryItem objects. Therefore, events such as history.onVisited will also fire for downloads.

Browser history is a chronological record of pages the user has visited. The history API enables you to:

However, the user may have visited a single page multiple times, so the API also has the concept of "visits". So you can also use this API to:

To use this API, an extension must request the "history" permission in its manifest.json file.

Types

history.TransitionType: Describes how the browser navigated to a particular page.
history.HistoryItem: Provides information about a particular page in the browser history.
history.VisitItem: Describes a single visit to a page.

Functions

history.search(): Searches the browser history for history.HistoryItem objects matching the given criteria.
history.getVisits(): Retrieves information about visits to a given page.
history.addUrl(): Adds a record to the browser history of a visit to the given page.
history.deleteUrl(): Removes all visits to the given URL from the browser history.
history.deleteRange(): Removes all visits to pages that the user made during the given time range.
history.deleteAll(): Removes all visits from the browser history.

Events

history.onTitleChanged: Fired when the title of a page visited by the user is recorded.
history.onVisited: Fired each time the user visits a page, providing the history.HistoryItem data for that page.
history.onVisitRemoved: Fired when a URL is removed completely from the browser history.

Browser compatibility

	Chrome	Edge	Firefox	Firefox for Android	Opera
`HistoryItem`	Yes	No	49 *	No	Yes
`TransitionType`	Yes	No	50	No	Yes
`VisitItem`	Yes	No	50	No	Yes
`addUrl`	Yes *	No	49	No	Yes *
`deleteAll`	Yes	No	49	No	Yes
`deleteRange`	Yes	No	49	No	Yes
`deleteUrl`	Yes	No	49	No	Yes
`getVisits`	Yes	No	50	No	Yes
`onTitleChanged`	No	No	55	No	No
`onVisitRemoved`	Yes	No	50	No	Yes
`onVisited`	Yes	No	50	No	Yes
`search`	Yes	No	49	No	Yes

Chrome incompatibilities

None.

Example extensions

history-deleter

Acknowledgements

This API is based on Chromium's chrome.history API. This documentation is derived from history.json in the Chromium code.

Microsoft Edge compatibility data is supplied by Microsoft Corporation and is included here under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

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