> It is surprising that modern browsers innovate so little - for example they do not have a mode that searches only URLs you have previously visited, which would obviously massively help with known item search.

What's worse, they don't have a useful list of those URLs anyway[0], not anymore - both Chrome and Firefox have some ridiculously short and (AFAIK) not configurable window of browsing history. At this point they could do away with the history tab completely, as it's perfectly calibrated to be useless: the links are dropped just as they cross the threshold between "likely still have it open in a tab" and "what was that thing I saw the other day?".

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[0] - Locally. I'm sure Google has it on their servers, but it's meant to help advertisers, not users.