If you want to find out more about the sites that you are visiting in the Firefox web browser, you may be interested in a new add-on from Mozilla's Prospector team. About:profile is a new add-on for Firefox that analyzes the browsing history to display a summary of site categories and demographics.

First thing you need to do to get this to work is to make sure that Firefox is configured to record the browsing history. You do that with a click on the Firefox button and the selection of Options from the context menu. Switch to the privacy tab in the options window and make sure remember my browsing and download history is checked there.

All that is left to do then is to visit the official Mozilla Add-ons repository to install the about:profile add-on from there. The add-on works silently in the background from that moment on.

The extension basically looks up information about visited domain names on Alexa and DMOZ to display the information on the about:profile page that you can open in the browser. Mozilla highlights in a blog posting that the process happens on the local system and that no information about it are submitted to Mozilla.

It only looks at the domains of pages you’ve visited and references them with two packaged sources of data: ODP categories and Alexa siteinfo. All the analysis is done within the add-on and no data is sent out from Firefox, so you can take a look at about:profile even when offline.

Information rely on the sources used, and if you have been to the sites, you know that they do not offer information about any site out there. This reduces the accuracy of the summary as a consequence.

Still, if you are interested about the categories of sites that you spend the most time on, or whether you are visiting "age-appropriate" sites or not, then this add-on may be for you. It is nothing that I'd keep running in the background all the time, but for a quick check of the sites that you have visited on a day or so, it is quite interesting.

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