Falcon – a Chrome extension for full text browsing history search
github.com
github.com
Which is kind of ironic since Google is all about search and data but can't handle a browser address bar...
At least, that's what it's supposed to do and is currently doing for me.
I just fired up Firefox, and neither actually seem to index into the content of the page, which is what's so cool about this modification.
I have confirmed it works fine on Windows 10 and OSX variants both in Canary and Stable.
You perhaps might be interested in reporting the bug. That's a major regression. I'd be annoyed if it was missing too. Not enough to go to Firefox, mind (the speed loss is too great once you have 20-40 tabs open), but it'd definitely lower the speed at which I work.
That leads me to my second point, TreeStyleTab. I commonly have 50+ tabs open, and they are nested nicely under each other so I actually can find them. In Chrome, there is bunch of half-baked addons for easier finding, but nothing like TreeStyleTab for Firefox.
Compared to TST it has two (major?) drawbacks upfront:
1. It sits on a separate window next to your other browser windows.
2. Some of its features are paid features.
I always thought that TST for Firefox has ruined all other browsers for me but I actually like Tab Outliner more than TST. Here are my reasons:
1. It manages all my browser windows in a single tree view. Separate windows are children of the current session.
2. Its has a much better keyboard support like rearranging tabs with your arrow keys while holding CTRL or indent/unindent a tab further into the tree with the usual TAB / Shift + TAB shortcuts.
2.1. Even rearranging your tabs with the mouse seems much more deterministic than in TST. In TST I struggle with rearranging a tab as a new child vs. as a new sibling tab.
3. You can unload tabs or entire subtrees (collapse its children and then press the green unload button) to free your RAM.
4. Google Drive backup feature to sync your entire tree to your other computers. You can restore your entire tree or just a subtree on an other device just via drag and drop.
I only use a subset of all Tab Outliner features but it is already giving me a much saner tab management experience than TST could do. The better keyboard support and syncing my tabs across devices while preserving the tree structure are essential features that I can't have with TST on Firefox. Personally I have more sympathy with the TST developer (always nice on GitHub) but Tab Outliner is still the better browser extension.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...
This is why Chrome is much slower than Firefox from a usability standpoint. Firefox sends you right where you want to go, where Google has an incentive to send you to a page full of ads on the way.
Seriously, tabs on the side in a tree view make SO MUCH SENSE!
I know many of you probably have a few dozen tabs in chrome open, and you gotta guess whats what from the icon. We keep making monitors more widescreen yet webpages mostly need a max-width. I'd bet in the next few years all browsers will switch tabs to a treeview like this.
And wow, the chrome extensions trying to do the same thing are fugly as all getout.
If not natively, which add-on are you using?
I like that the authors share my concern about installing an extension that would by design record every page I visit. However the repository contains several minified Javascript files [1]. This somewhat contradicts their invitation to read through the code.
[1] https://github.com/lengstrom/falcon/tree/master/extension/js...
However, I've found the originals so you can still check if they contain 'contaminated' code.
chrono: https://www.npmjs.com/package/chrono-node - a natural language date parser for Node and Browserify
notie: https://www.npmjs.com/package/notie - a clean and simple notification, input, and selection suite for javascript, with no dependencies
readability: https://github.com/arrix/node-readability - Node implementation of Arc90's Readability (however seems this code has been slightly modified)
semantic: https://github.com/Semantic-Org/Semantic-UI - Semantic UI JS support
stopwords: list of stopwords for the english language
Chrome web store doesn't care what I upload and push down to my users. I've had numerous requests from spammers looking to buy my extension based on the number of users and their geography. I guess once they buy an extension they push malware down to the users, so even if you can trust the extension developer or source now, you can't keep that trust up indefinitely.
After some investigating, this extension doesn't have an update_url in the manifest.json, so I think that means it won't/can't auto-update.
I voluntarily removed it from the web store after realizing it was caching lots of sensitive data. I eventually started encrypting the stored info but I realized that if the extension ever became very successful, it would become a target and I wasn't comfortable with that.
I hope the developer of this extension will invest more effort in their user's security than a simple blacklist.
Two caveats though: 1) obviously it can't index the pages you browsed before installing the extension and 2) it's a bit unclear how to use it (in searchbar press f tab).
I'm also interested to see info on storage usage after a long time using it.
The gif on this page is really bad at it.
Slow it down. I have watched it loop 5 times in the last 30 secondes and I still cannot tell what it is without reading the text. I feel dizzy.
Now that school is starting again, and I had some free time, I was thinking of working on a project that would allow to search through the websites you've visited, the documents you have on your machine, the photos and music you have on your machine (if you can run some program which generates a description for your photos and run some mp3 to lyrics program for the music), and all the same across many machines. I started looking at elasticsearch, because that is what I found during my research for the search tool I would need for this project.
Obviously searching pre-existing bookmarked content (and not just history) would entail far more complexity, probably requiring a back-end service.
The premium service caches the content of everything you bookmark using the service, with full-text search (in addition to the usual tagging).
I wonder how you solved the data storage and indexing. Does it scale to multi-month heavy usage ? Does it deduplicate multiple visits?
Cool stuff, gotta put mine somewhere. Always planned to, but never got around to it.
After encryption, things got unruly because the text had to be stored in fixed length chunks.