history

Use the history API to interact with the browser history.

If you are looking for information about the browser session history, see the History interface.

[!NOTE] Downloads are treated as HistoryItem objects. Therefore, events such as history.onVisited fire for downloads.

Browser history is a chronological record of pages the user has visited. The history API enables you to:

• search for pages that appear in the browser history
• remove individual pages from the browser history
• add pages to the browser history
• remove all pages from the browser history.

However, the user may have visited a single page multiple times, so the API also has the concept of “visits”. So you can also use this API to:

• retrieve the complete set of visits the user made to a particular page
• remove visits to any pages made during a given time period.

To use this API, an extension must request the “history” permission in its manifest.json file.

Types

• {{WebExtAPIRef("history.TransitionType")}} 
  • : Describes how the browser navigated to a particular page.
• {{WebExtAPIRef("history.HistoryItem")}} 
  • : Provides information about a particular page in the browser history.
• {{WebExtAPIRef("history.VisitItem")}} 
  • : Describes a single visit to a page.

Functions

• {{WebExtAPIRef("history.search()")}} 
  • : Searches the browser history for history.HistoryItem objects matching the given criteria.
• {{WebExtAPIRef("history.getVisits()")}} 
  • : Retrieves information about visits to a given page.
• {{WebExtAPIRef("history.addUrl()")}} 
  • : Adds a record to the browser history of a visit to the given page.
• {{WebExtAPIRef("history.deleteUrl()")}} 
  • : Removes all visits to the given URL from the browser history.
• {{WebExtAPIRef("history.deleteRange()")}} 
  • : Removes all visits to pages that the user made during the given time range.
• {{WebExtAPIRef("history.deleteAll()")}} 
  • : Removes all visits from the browser history.

Events

• {{WebExtAPIRef("history.onTitleChanged")}} 
  • : Fired when the title of a page visited by the user is recorded.
• {{WebExtAPIRef("history.onVisited")}} 
  • : Fired each time the user visits a page, providing the {{WebExtAPIRef("history.HistoryItem")}}  data for that page.
• {{WebExtAPIRef("history.onVisitRemoved")}} 
  • : Fired when a URL is removed completely from the browser history.

{{WebExtExamples("h2")}} 

Browser compatibility

{{Compat}} 

[!NOTE] This API is based on Chromium’s chrome.history API. This documentation is derived from history.json in the Chromium code.