Readable History in Netscape Browsers

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Readable History in Netscape Browsers

Postby th.61 » Thu 14 Dec, 2006 5:55 pm

Hi Everyone,

Here is a tech question for people who know their stuff.
I was wanting to know anyone knows the First time, or year, when the Netscape Browser for Macs had a readable 'History'.
I.E A readable file (list of websites visited etc) kept outside the browser in a document within the 'User' folder or 'Preferences'. (Stored where the cache and cookies are).

Can anyone help me?

subject renamed from "*Netscape Browser Archive Question*" to better reflect the topic and there's no need to steal attention. Antony 16.12.2006
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Postby Don_HH2K » Thu 14 Dec, 2006 6:07 pm

A history list has been in Netscape since 1.0 (and presumably some earlier test versions), but I'm not sure whether or not it saved its contents to the disk or dumped them on exit. I do know that Netscape 4.0x does save the list to the disk.
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Postby th.61 » Fri 15 Dec, 2006 1:30 am

Don, when you say a list which is saved to disk, is this one that is saved in the 'user' folder or 'preferences' folder Outside the browser on the computer?
And is it readable, ie. can you tell website urls, or is it just computer gibberish and code.

I thought that no netscapes browsers before 2001 or so had a readable history stored outside the browser in a word readable document.

Mark.
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Postby Don_HH2K » Fri 15 Dec, 2006 12:51 pm

Yes, when I said "saved to disk", I meant a history file stored outside the browser. I'm not sure how Netscape 4 saved the list, but Netscape 6 and higher save it such that you really couldn't easily read it (though it is coded with a human-readable set of letters and numbers and such). For example, Netscape and Firefox use the same kind of file to save browser history, and my Firefox history file looks like this:

Code: Select all
// <!-- <mdb:mork:z v="1.4"/> -->
< <(a=c)> // (f=iso-8859-1)
  (8A=Typed)(8B=LastPageVisited)(8C=ByteOrder)
  (80=ns:history:db:row:scope:history:all)
  (81=ns:history:db:table:kind:history)(82=URL)(83=Referrer)
  (84=LastVisitDate)(85=FirstVisitDate)(86=VisitCount)(87=Name)
  (88=Hostname)(89=Hidden)>

<(80=LE)>
{1:^80 {(k^81:c)(s=9)[1(^8C=LE)]} }
[45C:^80]
[45D:^80]


I don't have Communicator 4 installed on this computer, so I'd have to get back to you on whether or not it does the same thing or uses a different format.
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Postby th.61 » Sun 17 Dec, 2006 11:11 pm

An example of the readable history im wondering about is:

Ã
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Last edited by th.61 on Sun 17 Dec, 2006 11:14 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Postby Antony » Thu 28 Dec, 2006 2:54 pm

[quote="th.61"]An example of the readable history im wondering about is:

Ã
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