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Comment by espeed | Hacker News Reader

Knowing this is the direction things were headed, I have been trying to get Firefox and Google to create a feature that archives your browser history and pipes a stream of it in real time so that open-source personal AI engines can ingest it and index it.

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/archive-your-browser-hi...

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AFAICS this has nothing to do with "open-source personal AI engines".

The recorded history is stored in a SQLite database and is quite trivial to examine[0][1]. A simple script could extract the information and feed them to your indexer of choice. Developing such a script isn't the task for an internet browser engineering team.

The question remains whether the indexer would really benefit from real-time ingestion while browsing.

[0] Firefox: https://www.foxtonforensics.com/browser-history-examiner/fir...

[1] Chrome: https://www.foxtonforensics.com/browser-history-examiner/chr...

Due to the dynamic nature of the Web, URLs don't map to what you've seen. If I visit a URL at a certain time, the content I see is different than the content you see or even if I visit the same URL later. For example, if we want to know the tweets I'm seeing are the same as the tweets you're seeing and haven't been subtly modified by an AI, how do you do that? In the age of AI programming people, this will be important.

I'm confused, do you want more than the browser history then? ...something like Microsoft's Recall? Browsers currently don't store what they've seen and for good reasons. I was with you for a sec, but good luck convincing Mozilla to propagate rendered pages to other processes then!

Being able to index and own your data changes the model of the Web.

So you're one of those people trying to attach history to everything!

Yeah I am sure lots of people want their pornhub history integrated into AI...

If that is the "future" (gag), we better be able to opt out

It's your personal AI running locally on your machine, you can opt out of what you index. You own your data.

Why not Chrome Devtools MCP?

I understand GP like they want to browse normally and have that session's history feed into another indexing process via some IPC like D-Bus. It's meant to receive human events from the browser.

Chrome Devtools MCP on the other hand is a browser automation tool. Its purpose is to make it trivial to send programmed events/event-flows to a browser session.

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