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Didn't Chrome do this at the very beginning, when it was initially released? I faintly remember that being a feature.

Personally I would already be content if my browsers didn't forget their history all the time, both Firefox and Safari history is way too short-lived.

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You were probably thinking of Google Desktop which could search almost anything on your machine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop

I went looking and it was indeed Chrome that could do it. See screenshot from 2009 here: https://superuser.com/a/42499

Google removed the feature intentionally in 2013: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=297648

Apparently Opera supported it too at the time, and from the comments Safari as well.

Performance reasons seem to have killed it. I'd think that after 10 years now any modern computer would be able to handle it.

That's an interesting find.

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