MakeUseOf » browsing history

Expand Your Browsing History Search Capabilities With Recall Monkey [Firefox]

Ann Smarty — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 01:31:41 +0000

We have previously covered a few great browsing history tools. For example, we have shared FromWhereToWhere which structures your web history effectively as well as 4 more extensions to search and record browsing history. Today’s addon is another worthy history search tool to check out.

RecallMonkey is a new promising project by Mozilla Labs aiming at making it easier for you to find pages you have previously visited. Obviously, the addon is based on your Firefox history database, so it will only dig as deep as you let your browser access (you can change your browser history settings in Tools -> Options -> Privacy. There use the drop-down to select “Use custom settings for history“).

Testing The Addon

Get the addon here (it requires no restart). Once you have it installed, access RecallMonkey using the icon in the Addon Bar or the shortcut Ctrl + Shift + M (Cmd + Shift + M for Macs).

The main thing the addon does is expand your search results. Your default history search tool (accessed with the Ctrl + H shortcut) can only search by exact match whereas RecallMonkey ranks pages in your web history “based on how closely your search query and document matches“.

For example, searching my history for [software and tips] using the built-in option, I am only able to find MakeUseOf (because it has both the words in the title). Using RecallMonkey, I am getting dozens of results which are also very relevant.

Compare:

Apart from this, the addon offers a few other options.

Filter By Time

With the default history search you can only sort by time. RecallMonkey uses Google-like date-filtering options that let you see results you visited:

During the past 24 hours;
Last week;
Last month;
Last year;
All time

“Prioritize” Or Exclude Websites

Apart from time-frame-based filters, we are offered two more ways to control the results: prioritizing and excluding websites:

By prioritizing a result (using a Reddit-like up arrow next to it), you are prompting the tool that you want to see more results from this domain;
By excluding a result (using a + sign next to it), you are forcing the tool to filter this domain out from the search results.

For example, you remember that software review was on MakeUseOf, so you can prioritize MakeUseOf results (by clicking the up-arrow sign next to it):

You can also prioritize all your bookmarks in search results which also sounds like a great way to find results you once liked. This option should come in handy for bringing up pages which are hidden away in the bookmarks database (especially unsorted bookmarks which you saved years ago).

To conclude, this looks like an awesome tool. The fun features above coupled with Instant (as-you-type) search results and infinite scroll (the page adds results as you scroll to the bottom) make it almost as awesome as Google.

The best features of the tool which I really liked:

The ability to dig deep into the search history and find results which only “mention” one of the search terms I was using (as well as the ability to retrieve local files that I opened in Firefox);
The speed and user-friendly interface (which looks like the developers have adopted some great Google design trends)

What are your thoughts about the tool?

2 Awesome Firefox Address Bar Shortcuts You Should Make Use Of

Ann Smarty — Tue, 17 May 2011 01:31:12 +0000

Firefox’s “Awesome Bar” is known to save you time on typing the URL: just start typing any part of the domain, URL path or page title and Firefox will “guess” where you are heading. Someone may find the feature “too smart” but it’s been working wonders for me for ages. I barely open my bookmarks now to find my saved pages or search Google to remember the page I once visited and forgot to save the URL.

FireFox’s Awesome Bar “Frecency” (“frequency” + “recency”) algorithm has worked very well for quickly finding what I need and where I want to go:

Frecency is a score given to each unique URI in Places, encompassing bookmarks, history and tags. This score is determined by the amount of revisitation, the type of those visits, how recent they were, and whether the URI was bookmarked or tagged.

But even using it for ages, I wasn’t aware of the following Firefox Awesome Bar tips which make it even more awesome!

1. Three Awesome Awesome Bar Search Tips

Typing what you remember about the required URL is almost always enough to instantly find what you need but did you know that you can filter Awesome Bar suggestions by type?

Only Search Within Your Bookmarks

Type a single * and then your search term. Only bookmarked pages will be searched and, what’s more, the associated tags will be displayed and the tag names will also match your search (when possible):

Quick tip! Do you want to see the list of your most frequent and recent bookmarks? Just type a single * in the awesome bar and see the list!

Only Search Within Your History

Use ^ to filter search to your browser history (and exclude pages that have been given a star).

Quick tip! Use ^ ( without additional search terms) to find pages that you have visited frequently and recently to consider bookmarking and tagging them:

Only Search Within Your Tagged Pages

Use + that restricts the search to tagged pages (and search within tags as well).

2. Quickly Find Any Open Tab

If you are a fan of FireFox 4 “Switch to Tab” functionality that lets you quickly jump to a currently open tab (instead of loading the same page again in a new tab), you will love this tip.

To see the list of all currently open tabs in your browser, just type % in your Awesome bar and you’ll see the list and, what’s more, will get an option to jump to any of those:

Quick Tip! If you have too many tabs open, you can quickly find the one you have in mind: just start typing a related word after the %:

In case you are looking forward to more FireFox URL bar tips, here’s an old post we did on how to enhance productivity with FireFox’s Address bar that lists some handy keyboard shortcuts to activate and browse the Awesome Bar as well as some other tips and addons.

Are you aware of any other awesome Awesome Bar search tips and shortcuts? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Structure Your FireFox Browsing History With FromWhereToWhere

Ann Smarty — Tue, 10 May 2011 01:30:12 +0000

We’ve seen quite a few interesting tools that could allow us to make the most of and get more productive with our browsing history: here are 4 Firefox addons to search and record browsing history and here’s another guide on how to record and print out browsing history on Firefox and Internet Explorer.

FromWhereToWhere is another way to dig into your browsing history and structure it in some way.

Similar to the no-longer-supported addon called “Referrer History”, this tool structures your FireFox history based on which page took you to the current URL and where you headed after that.

More Effective Search

Web search may be very addictive and hectic. You click through the search results, then you start clicking links on the target pages – and you ultimately forget where you actually started and how you got to the current page. With FromWhereToWhere addon you can always get a well-structured picture of what you’ve been doing.

It only shows the web history that is related to the currently active URL instead of displaying all the browsing history.

All you need to do is to click FromWhereToWhere item in your FireFox “Tools” menus when on the search results page and:

You’ll see the list of pages you clicked from the search results;
Each node can be expanded if there are URLs that you visited from the URL it stands for;
Each page has the exact date when you visited it for the last time;
You can open a URL by right click on the node -> “open in new tab”, or simple double click.

Note: the addon does NOT collect browsing history, Firefox does when you let it. FromWhereToWhere only search through the history data kept by Firefox. This means that you are not allowing any third-party tool to access your history. Instead, the tool is using the database which already exists within your browser and moreover the tool is analyzing the information locally.

You can control what the tool has access to by tweaking your FireFox browsing history settings:

Go to: Tools -> Options -> Privacy and there select “Use custom history for settings”. Now you have more freedom with tweaking what is being saved:

Remember your browsing history or your download history;
Remember your search and form history;
Clear history when you browse the history:

Domain Browsing History

The tool offers a clearly structured domain history: which links you clicked off from any domain or website. The search result proximity can be somehow controlled:

Search terms that are not quoted are considered optional. A page will show up in search results if its title has any (at least one) of the optional terms;
If you need an exact match, you’ll have to use the phrase in quotes;
You can also exclude any word with help of – operator: -word:

Easy Note Taking

The addon has a useful note-taking feature inside that lets you quickly save some URLs for further reference:

Hold CTRL to select multiple links;
Right-click and select “Save to local notes”
A note will be created named after the top selected URL:

Additional fun feature: Scrapbook support – if a link had been captured by the add-on Scrapbook, it’ll be highlighted in Italic font – which makes this addon even more note-taking-friendly.

What are your thoughts? Does this look like a promising addon!

How to Delete Recent Searches Without Accidentally Leaving a Trace

James Bruce — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 17:30:05 +0000

With increasing concerns about web security and online identities, hiding your presence has become a concern for many. Luckily, modern browsers are aware of this, so today I’d like to show you how to delete your history (including searches, cookies, cache, etc.) from 3 major browsers, as well as from your Google account.

We’ve covered this topic a number of times already — Steve taught us how to securely delete our Internet Explorer history and Bakari went through the basic steps to clear previous Google searches. Since technology and browsers are constantly changing, it’s worth mentioning again.

First up, if you are using Internet Explorer, then all bets are off. You’re using the most vulnerable browser in history, and are potentially leaving your entire computer open to malicious software, let alone just your browser history. There is no excuse — go and download Firefox or Chrome now.

Why should I care?

There’s a variety of ways in which your personal search data is stored in the browser, and your internet history is just one. While someone may not purposefully sit at your PC directly searching through your history files and cookies, they might inadvertently hit on something you’d rather was kept private. Like in the following example, where a relative is using my computer to search for information on the “dodgers”, only to find some questionable suggestions being pulled from my personal search form history as they begin to type.

You might also be shocked to learn that if you have a Google account, your entire Google search history may be recorded. Since I’ve been using Gmail since July 2006, every single search I’ve ever performed is stored in my Google account. Here’s a sneak peek at the first things Google ever recorded me searching for!

To be honest, I couldn’t care less about my personal search history being stored at Google – but I know some of you might be quite terrified at this point, so I’ll show you how to delete all of that, too.

Firefox

From the Firefox Tools menu, you can easily select the “Clear Recent History” option. Select the time frame, and if you need to delete absolutely everything, I’d suggest ticking the “Site Preferences” option too.

A better option is to use the Private Browsing feature, which will put your browser into a special private mode and simply not save any data or searches. That’s also a single click away from Tools -> Start Private Browsing. We’ve covered a bunch of Firefox Privacy add-ons before, too.

Chrome

If you only wish to delete a single item from your browsing history, Chrome has a special “Edit Items” option on its history page that you can access from the wrench icon (top right) -> History.

If you’d rather delete everything else too, you can do so from the wrench icon -> Tools -> Clear Browsing Data, which will bring up a dialog as follows.

A far better solution is to browse particular sites using Chrome’s special Incognito mode, accessed by pressing Ctrl+Shift+N (Mac users: Cmd+Shift+N), or through the wrench menu. In this mode, which looks like the screenshot below – none of your personal data is stored, nor any history recorded on the browser side.

Safari

Safari’s options are a little more limited than both Firefox and Chrome, in that instead of carefully carving a particular period of time from your browsing history, you simply get the option to “Reset Everything”. It’s ugly, and you’re going to lose every bit of data stored, but if you have to do it then you can get to it from the Safari menu.

Notice that Safari also has a private browsing mode, so if you don’t want to have to delete all your browsing data in future, you should use private browsing instead.

Google Account Data

You can tell if you logged into a Google account by visiting the usual Google.com search page. If your Google sign-in email address is show in the top right, you are signed in. To check out all the data they store on you, click on Settings -> Google Account settings.

At the top of the page, under the Personal Settings column, you’ll see an option for Dashboard – View data store with this account. Click that.

Depending on what services you have ever used, the page you will be presented with will be different. I’ve always experimented with whatever Google has thrown into the wild, so my stored is too long a list to show here. Scroll down to the section labelled “Web History”, then click on the “Remove items or clear Web History” option in the highlighted blue box to the right. At this point, you might also notice the option to Turn Off Google Goggles Search History if you are so inclined.

You will then be presented with your entire search history, which you can browse through if you are curious, or just click “Remove items” from the left sidebar, or “Clear entire Web History” for a more nuclear approach to the matter.

Well, I hope that’s been useful to some of you. Remember that using private browsing features in every browser mentioned is always easier and safer that trying to delete traces after the fact.

Were you shocked to find out how much information Google was actually storing about you? Personally, I keep my searches in there in the hope that my Google search experience will be more personalized, and perhaps help to keep my own personal bit of the internet a little more free from spam. It’s also quite voyeuristically fascinating to go back over my own personal search history!

Viewing Recent Searches On Google & Why Would You Care?

Bakari Chavanu — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:31:11 +0000

Without doubt, Google is the premier search engine for the Internet world. So much so that its name is both a noun and verb. We not only link to Google, but we also “google” stuff. Many of us “google” something several times a day because of its speed and accuracy of search results. But as a Google user, you may not know that this mighty search engine actually keeps track of your search history – of what, when, and where you looked for stuff on the Internet.

If you don’t know how Google does this, simply link over to http://www.google.com/history and sign into your account, if need be. On your Google search page, you will see a calendar that links to all your daily activities across the web, including recent searches on Google. It breaks down your search history into nine categories, including images, products, and blogs you’ve visited or searched for.

Advantages Of This Service

The advantages of this search history is pretty obvious. It can save you time in keeping track of your recent searches on Google. Searches are not as specific as keeping personalized bookmarks in your web browser, but say you spent a day or two researching a particular consumer product, or a topic for a school assignment. If you need to retrieve those queries and activity, you could simply click the dates in the calendar relevant to your search, or you could “google” the topic or keywords and have Google provide results based on your search history.

Also, you’ve no doubt noticed that when you begin typing in the Google search box in the Firefox or Safari web browser, for example, you typically get a list of suggested keywords that you might be looking for even before you finish typing. Those suggestions are based on your prior searches and visitations across the web, which in essence speeds up your search.

The search history also provides an organized list of sites and pages you visit the most. It keeps track of your web experiences only when you’re logged into your account. This is called “signed-in personalization”. However, if you share your computer with others and you don’t sign out from your Google account, the results reflect searches by other users.

Disadvantages Of This Service

One of the biggest disadvantages to this is that if your Google account is ever accessed by others, they can view your recent searches on Google. If you log into your Google account on another computer and don’t log out, any searches done by other users can be saved to your account.

For example, when I view my Google search history, it includes topics like “horse riding,” the “California State lottery,” and “buddytv.” These topics reflect the web activity of other members in my household, not me. But what might this service mean for users accessing their Google account on their job or public computer? If users don’t log out of their account, their search history is available to anyone who accesses it.

Removing Searches from your history

If there are some surreptitious search results that you would liked removed from your web history , it’s pretty easy to do so. Simply log into your web history account and click the “Remove items“ link. You can delete selected links or your entire web history. However, remember, if you delete your entire history, Google will have to rebuild your signed-in personalization history, so all your new searches may take a little longer to conduct on your computer.

If you’re conducting some searches that you don’t want recorded, simply click the Pause link to turn off the service for your account. It remains paused until you re-enable it. You can also go into the settings of your Google account and totally disable the service all together. When you link into your Google account, click on My Account, and where it says “My products,” click Edit. From there you can remove the service.

Personally I don’t view my Google search history that much, but after doing some research for this article, I can see some advantages to accessing it from time to time, especially when I haven’t bookmarked relevant searches I might want to review. But for users who conduct surreptitious searches on a regular basis, it might be a good idea to disable the service all together and use other free services like Delicious to maintain and manage your private bookmarks.

So do you access your Google web history regularly? Do you find the service useful, or do you think it invades your privacy? Let us know.

In an upcoming article, I will explain how to clear previous Google searches in popular web browsers.

Do You Know What The Internet Knows About You?

Tina Sieber — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:31:47 +0000

Have you ever wondered whether surfing really is anonymous?

You browse the internet, you open and close websites, and you do not enter personal information, at least not often. While you do that, each and every page you visit leaves a little trace behind. If this information is not deleted, it can be used not only to track your browsing habits, but also to find out who you are.

Are you curious to find out What The Internet Knows About You? Then visit that link and see whether the information displayed is vaguely familiar. My result revealed that I had visited 65 of the 5,000 most popular internet websites.

And there is more. Did You Watch Porn? If your significant other checks your browser(s), he’d better find this:

Not shocked, yet? Maybe you are using XING. If you are, you will be interested in This Experiment.

It demonstrates how your anonymity can be lifted based on the social network groups you belong to. And this doesn’t work for just XING! If you are an active user of any social network, you likely belong to different groups within the network. Your group profile is almost like a fingerprint. The more groups you belong to, the less likely there will be someone else who is assigned to exactly the same groups and no others. The group traces left in your browser can lead back to who you are – your profile and eventually your real name.

So how can any website out there get access to this type of information?

History

Your browser stores a history of websites you have visited. Firefox typically records the past 7 days of browsing, downloads, as well as search and form history. Anyone who can open your browser has access to this information. Moreover, any website you open can look into your browser history and see which other websites you have been visiting. This information is being used to display custom information to you.

If you are uncomfortable with this type of information being available, you can customize your browser settings and disable history. In Firefox, go to > Tools > Options and navigate to the > Privacy tab.

Here you can choose the settings you’re comfortable with, for example > Clear history when Firefox closes or use the private browsing session.

Cookies

The screenshot above also shows what other traces websites leave on your computer: cookies.

Cookies are used to store user preferences, for example options, the contents of your shopping cart, or even usernames and passwords. Cookies are only text files, which can easily be viewed and will reveal which sites they originate from. So they are yet another threat to your privacy.

In Firefox, you can disable or remove cookies through the > Tools > Options > Privacy tab. Make your selection which types of cookies you would like to accept. To view or remove existing cookies, click on > Show Cookies and the menu shown in the screenshot below will open. You can remove individual cookies or all cookies at once.

CSS Styling Information: Visited Links

This is probably the least known “open door” to your privacy. All browsers can mark links to websites you have previously visited in a different color. For example, when you search Google, you immediately recognize which website you have already visited based on the link color.

While disabling browser history can be quite uncomfortable, disabling CSS styling information comes at a lower cost, but is just as effective. How it works is that your browser will not return information to a website, revealing whether or not you have already visited that or other websites. Hence, that website won’t be able to color code visited links or sniff out information about you.

In Firefox 3.5 you can easily disable visited links. Type > about:config in the address bard of your browser, filter for > layout.css.visited_links_enabled and double click the item to set its value to > false.

For Firefox, there are also several extensions and options that will protect your privacy. Here are a few articles you may want to review:

Guy showed you how to Really Delete Your Browsing History.
Karl wrote about a handy extension: Close N’ Forget Covers Your Firefox Browsing Tracks.
Varun compiled the 10+ Best Firefox Security and Privacy Addons.

Whether you disabled and cleared your browser history or disabled CSS visited link styling information, the result of What The Internet Knows About You should now be negative, the XING experiment should not reveal your name, and your significant other will never find out whether or not you did watch porn. Hooray for privacy!

Did the internet know anything about you that got you worried?

Image credits: mzacha

WebReview – Browse Smarter With This Firefox Add-on

Saikat Basu — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:31:41 +0000

The television has one slight edge over the browser. With the TV, we can directly switch on the channel you want. With the browser, we have to type in the URL or click on a bookmark. But that’s just an analogy.

Browsers these days are making it easier to get off the starting blocks with enhancements under the hood or startup page add-ons. The updated Google Chrome browser has some nifty features that make it easy to visualize what you have been visiting. The history thumbnails can be rearranged and hidden or neatly turned into a browser homepage.

It’s not often Firefox looks towards Chrome for inspiration, but the Firefox add-on called WebReview does exactly that and takes it further up the path. The WebReview Firefox add-on takes the history of Firefox and puts in several enhancements that make browsing and going back in time via the links in History, more intuitive.

WebReview can be configured as a centralized start page or it can be brought out into the open from the Tools menu of the browser where the WebReview sub-menu resides after installation. You can also put the WebReview icon button on the Toolbar button from View ““ Toolbars ““ Customize. WebReview utilizes the meta-data available with Firefox History to generate four statistics to cover all of your browsing.

The meta-data gleaned from your browsing history is generated by the program when it first starts up. It can also be manually generated later. This is what you will see when the add-on is installed.

Four Types of Information Which Makes For Smarter Browsing

Use it as a start page (WebReview MyStart) or bring it up manually, WebReview gives a four sided perspective on your browsing habits. The screenshot below explains it at a glance ““

Recently Closed
Most Visited
Visited Daily
Proposals for Today

All browsing activity gets bunched up into these four groups. Thumbnails and data-like frequency of visits further helps to sort it out visually. Beyond the visual data is a smart bit of technology which sees action in the Proposal for today section. WebReview tracks and sorts which sites you visit on which days. This bit of information helps it to bring up the very same websites as suggestions, on those corresponding days. WebReview recognizes your increase or decrease in visits and changes in tune with it.

Two More Tools Up WebReview’s Sleeve

Two additional tools in the WebReview menu help to give you more control over your browsing history.

WebReview Chronicle

It’s behaves like an indexer and filter for all the URLs you visit. A set of filters help you get to any page you visited, if it’s recorded in the browser’s History. Website addresses are also grouped by domain/host and subdomain respectively. So you can dive down into a specific page of a website by selecting the domain and then the particular page.

WebReview Graph

Browsers have a peculiar problem called the “˜back-forward problem’. As explained in the add-on’s documentation,

If you click on a link on page A, you get to page B. If you then use the Back button of the browser to get back to page A, and from there click on another link that brings you to page C, page B is lost. You can’t reach it anymore through the Back and Forward buttons of the browser.

WebReview Graph is a tool which solves this by displaying all pages you have visited in each browsing session. WebReview does this through a visual of connected nodes making it useful for getting to the “˜lost’ pages in between two link clicks. If you like details, you can also generate a HTML report from here.

WebReview isn’t so useful if you have a habit of cleaning your browsing history after every session. As a tracker, the Firefox add-on needs all the help it can get to understand your browsing habits.

We all have our browsing habits and sometimes we follow a pattern. WebReview helps to uncover that and makes our browsing more efficient using the three tools. Even if you disregard the tech chatter, WebReview does one thing very simply ““ it speeds up the search for an already visited page.

Do you think WebReview makes for a value added Firefox add-on? Download it from the Firefox add-ons page and let us know.

How To Record and Print out Browsing History on Firefox and Internet Explorer

Karl L. Gechlik — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:01:13 +0000

Anyone in the IT industry has been asked to covertly record or recover a user’s browsing history. It comes with the job and no one likes it. We like it even less when you have to take screenshots over and over again of long lists of URL’s. Internet Explorer and Firefox both do not have a method to print out a user’s browsing history.

So what do you do?

Get an intern to do it? Nope because it is confidential!

Bang your head against the wall? Nope!

As you are a Make Use Of reader we are here to show you a solution.

That solution comes from one of our favorite utility programmers ““ NirSoft . NirSoft has two applications Mozilla History View and IEHistoryView. As you can probably work out, each one of them works for their respective browser and will not work with the other. So keep both of them on your memory stick when you go a’ hunting.

Run the portable application and it will start scanning the machine instantly. Below I ran this on..umm…a user’s machine – yeah that’s the ticket ““ a user’s machine and not mine at all!

The application will scan all your (or a user’s) browsing history and return it in the graphical user interface. If you browsed your local machine with your browser it will show up here as well.

Uh oh”¦.this person (not me! ) has been browsing the Pirate Bay and Rapidshare! Wow and they have been downloading files! For shame for shame! Now we need to record and export browsing history to send to Human Resources. We simply hit the save button on the tool bar which you can see represented by a disk like so:

Once you hit that button you will have several options for file types such as CSV, TXT, XML, HTML or even a “tabular” file. Once you save it you can print or email it at will!

The Internet Explorer version is very similar ““ actually identical but it obviously reads in a different history file and has a different name.

Again your desktop browsing will also show up in here so you can catch someone opening porn or other non work related items (unless you work for a porn company!). Both applications have a different set of fields and they are from the IE application:

URL
Title
Hits (counter)
Page Modified Date
Expiration date of the page
User
History folder

Firefox’s columns are a little better with:

URL
Title
First Visit
Last Visit
Visit Count
Refering site
Host Name
Title
Record Index
Visit type (Download, link or typed URL) <— This is the big one that proves the site was typed in instead of being opened by a pop up or something along those lines.

No one wants to be the bad guy and get people fired but network security is a administrator’s job and sometimes the job can fall on a executive secretary or anyone ““ at least make the job of recording browsing history a little less painful with these easy to use tools.

Nirsoft rocks! Are you familiar with any other program to print Firefox or Internet Explorer browsing history to a file doing this? Hit us up in the comments!

How To Uninstall Applications Efficiently And Remove Obsolete Files

Stefan Neagu — Fri, 29 May 2009 17:00:30 +0000

If there’s something Windows and Mac users share, it’s the problem of uninstalling applications ““ and removing the debris left over.

Most uninstallers on Windows don’t remove everything, and often times they leave behind orphaned registry keys, file type associations, icons or even entire folders.

If Mac users have it easy, a simple drag and drop into the AppCleaner, there are lots of alternatives for Windows users which range from ‘the good, the bad and the ugly’.

I’ve found two that are – just nice.

Piriform CCleaner

Piriform CCleaner, available as freeware, scores high points all around with a simple interface and a complete set of features. CCleaner will:

Search the computer and remove obsolete system files.
Delete browser history, cookies and cache for all the major browsers.
Search the registry for problems, back it up and fix it.
Uninstall applications, rename and remove entries from “˜Add/Remove Applications’.
Remove or disable start-up items.
Automatically update itself if you allow it.

CCleaner is in my opinion, the best choice at the moment if you’re looking for an application to keep the cruft under control. I run CCleaner on my Windows XP SP3 machine almost weekly and every time I do, it removes at least 50MB of unnecessary files as well as a few registry keys.

Revo Uninstaller

Revo Uninstaller, although it has a more advanced uninstaller routine, comes in second because the interface is slightly clunky when compared to CCleaner. In addition to removing applications and cleaning the registry, Revo Uninstaller also has:

“˜Browser Cleaner’ that removes traces of web surfing.
“˜Microsoft Office Cleaner’ that clears the recent documents history.
“˜Windows Cleaner’ that removes cache and history files from Explorer, such as Recent Documents.
“˜Evidence Remover’ that overwrites free space to clean tracks of already deleted files and an “˜Unrecoverable Delete’.

The “˜Hunter Mode’, specific to Revo Uninstaller, enables you to choose the application you want to remove with the mouse ““ which is useful if the program you’re trying to remove doesn’t show up in the Add/Remove Programs list.

In order to write this article, I’ve also tested Absolute Uninstaller, Safarp, Perfect Uninstaller and MyUninstaller. I didn’t include these alternatives in the article because they’re not worth your time ““ either they’re worse than the integrated Windows application or they require you to upgrade to the so-called premium version.

Not impressed by either apps? At MakeUseOf, there’s always another choice. Check out these articles for other popular uninstallers and security apps:

As always, I’d like to hear from you in the comments. Which application do you think is better? None? Suggest one for us then!

Close N’ Forget Covers Your Firefox Browsing Tracks

Karl L. Gechlik — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:01:04 +0000

This is a Firefox plug-in that might make you very happy! Close n’ Forget does one thing and it does it well. We all browse through websites that we might be embarrassed about. There are web searches you do that you would NEVER EVER want others to see.

Yes that is why you learned about your Web History and cookies. You even know how to delete them when you are done with your porn your research. But what happens if you forget? Will you be fired, divorced or worse?

If this has you worried then Close N’ Forget is the plug-in for you!

Simply browse on over to their plug-in page here (in French) and you can do your due diligence and read up on it here in English.

After running through the plug-in installation you will have a right click option that looks like this:

The red X followed by “Close and erase cookies for the current site” is Close N’ Forget’s icon. Now for easier use we will add it to our FireFox’s favorite quick links by following these steps:

Right Click on your tool bar at the top of your browser. And choose Customize.

Select the Close and forget button, you might have to scroll down. It will look like this:

Simply drag and drop the icon to your favorites bar and you will see it as the red x icon like this:

Now that we have the icon readily available to us let’s look at the options. This is what will happen when you hit that magic red x. We can see and configure the settings by going to our add-on manager within Firefox. You go to Tools ““> Add-ons.

Select Close N’ Forget and then hit options. You can tweak exactly what it will junk with the options above.

The Author says:

Thanks to a few simple options, you can control how your privacy is protected when you close a tab with Close’n Forget. To do that, simply go to the extension manager and open the Close’n Forget options dialog.

You can then activate or not the cookie removal, and you can extend it to all subdomains of the current page’s domain. For example, if the page currently loaded in the tab is http://www.foo.com/bar.html, you can remove cookies for www.foo.com and for .foo.com, but also for media.foo.com, ad.foo.com, tracker.foo.com and so on !

You can also remove the visited site from the browser’s history.

Now let’s put it to work!

You do some super secret browsing and then you go and hit that red X on your toolbar. The button glows an eerie redish brown when you hover over it to help you distinguish it from other buttons. Hit the button and it closes the active tab and displays a message at the bottom of your browser like so telling you what it did. If nothing appears nothing was removed:

So with the right options selected (all of them!) you can safely and securely remove whatever site you want from your browsing history. But remember if someone is watching you with monitoring software this will not help!

How do you protect your browsing history and how do you get rid of nasty entries from your history? Do you automate it or do you do it manually? Share your methods with us in the comments.