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Comment by jval43 | Hacker News Reader

Google Chrome did this in 2008. Full-text search over all visited pages, stored offline. It was very useful and I miss it.

Nobody seems to remember it, even though it was a headline feature. Was removed in 2013, I think due to technical constraints.

Will definitely try this.

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I remember this as well. I hadn't noticed it was gone until just now, but you're right.

Edit: Found it. Thanks Claude.

https://github.com/ssnangua/google-chrome-comic-hd/blob/main...

https://dfir.blog/history-index-files-removed-from-chrome-v3...

Now we have no browser capable of searching in anything - not even Firefox. I routinely try, in several browser, to find a tab among open tabs, a bookmark among open bookmarks, or a history entry (both from "omnibox" and dedicated history pane), and it never seems to find it - not by name, not by URL - until it gets a 100% unique match.

It's like there's a timer or a cache somewhere, with aggressive limit, saying "only scan these top 100 results and then abort if it takes more than 10 ms to findf anything", or something. Making this completely useless.

That's on top of occasional deletion of browsing history past few weeks.

Have you tried searching with @tabs, @bookmarks or @history? It works reasonably well for me.

Yes. Try it regularly, against inputs I know correspond to things visited or bookmarked within last couple months. Almost never gives the actual result unless it's literal full-string match. That's why I'm complaining.

Maybe stop using the mickey mouse browsers? I mean Firefox is pretty much a lost cause.. unless you start using extensions. I agree those are basic features that should be built-in. In qutebrowser I use them reliably all the time. E.g press T (keybinding for :tab-focus command) - type keyword (matches against tab ID, page title, page URL & the tab's process ID) - press Tab - menu is populated with results - cycle through them using Tab/Shift+Tab - press Enter to jump to it. Similar workflow for history, different bookmark types, etc. History can also be loaded as an HTML page and jumped through with regex, etc. If you want to stick with

For things I access often, the Firefox address bar does function like a near-perfect search for me. Some things I type [ab cd] and the page with the words _starting_ ab and cd pops right up.

A while back I looked up a manual for an old Singer sewing machine, which turned out to be the model 15. So I typed [sin 15] in the address bar and -- yep, first result! A week ago I looked into the game Metroid Dread. Typed [met dre] and two relevant pages from my history came up, immediately.

I don't know what you mean by "100% unique match" but, this feature works for me, and in fact I regularly use it and find it very worthwhile.

No one will ever see this (probably) but I remembered this comment, and just had this experience:

I've been learning the eBay developer APIs. Recently (i.e. within the past few hours) I looked up the "Browse API" specifically. My first or second try failed so I typed just [ebay brows] and didn't find it! But when I finished [ebay browse] that document (within ebay.com and titled "Browse API | eBay Develo...") did show up!

I can't reproduce now so I can only guess but it's possible this was a timing thing. I was typing several things, and changing/re-typing "as soon as" I did or did not see what I wanted to show up. But there was definitely a moment where I'd expect "that page I just had open an hour ago" to be at the top, but instead search suggestions (ugh, search in the address bar ...) were all that was showing.

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by saying "I routinely try, in several browser, to find a tab among open tabs, a bookmark among open bookmarks," but if you - like me - keep hundreds of open tabs in a couple of dozen windows and you can't find the tab you need at the moment, then you may be happy with the Firefox extension tabFx...

Not sure if the same product. I think the one I used was Google Desktop.

I even hacked it for a company I was working for at the time: I installed it in a machine that had a lot of pdfs from some other client company of them.

I don't recall the exact details, but I did some sort of proxying between the Microsoft Web Server that came with NT? at the time and G Desktop, and then an entire team of first support agents had almost instant search across all those docs. Good times.

Now Chrome can't even remember what addresses you went to more than 90 days ago. It's such a nerfed browser.

Still boggles my mind that people went from ridiculing people who installed Ad companies browser toolbars, to actually running their browser.

...And don't give me the tired "it was faster". this horse was already beaten to death and it was 110% marketing.

When chrome was literally first released it was in fact faster than IE and Firefox, by quite a lot, and had some nice features that neither had, too. But that gap didn't last for long.

lol. it amuses me how much people are the marketing and now forces themselves to remember it wrobg.

when it launched it was fast because it had LESS features.

It was so much faster you could not believe it. It was a revelation and even though "degoogling" was already a thing, Chrome was so much better than the rest that you just had to use it. Tabs actually worked without crashing your PC.

The risks were clear from day one but Google and Chrome were great to both users and devs, and it stayed like that for a long time.

There was also Google Desktop Search for several years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop

with RCE and no privacy

I.e. like any good tool?

> I think due to technical constraints.

I think due to shareholders wanting new sportcars. The offline pages don't show Google Ads.

IE5 only on the mac, did this too.

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