Unity Web History lens: Firefox and Chrome History in Unity Dash

Source: iloveubuntu.com

Browsing the web is a daily activity, where thousands and thousands of webpages are visited, helping us to obtain informations related to subjects of interest, downloading packages, etc.

Unity Web History lens gathers, categorizes and displays one's visited webpages in the Dash, allowing users to easily access visited webpages by simply typing a word and opening (by clicking on it) the desired item.

Taking advantage of the fancy card view, the Web History lens displays its items with per-website-icon, title and link, consequently, the user easily identifies with increased accuracy the relevant items.

Unity Web History lens organizes the searched&found item in proper categories, like Recently Visited Websites, Most Popular Websites, but, if no words are typed in the search area, only the Firefox Bookmarks are exposed, thus presenting itself with a clean initial look that pulls the required data only on demand and, in the same time, presents the immediate option to access the bookmarks without any typing action.

In order to gather data, the History lens needs scopes/sources, without scopes, the lens offers only Firefox's bookmarks, without an actual web history and, so, reducing its utility.

In the same PPA, it is available a packaged Zeitgeist Firefox datasource, that, once installed, pushes the Firefox's web history into the lens (no further tweaks or separate packages needed), transforming Unity Web History lens into a full-fledged powerful tool to access one's desired websites at a press of a button, remembrance-aware, enhanced time endurance, proper exposing, etc.

Furthermore, as a handy addition, Chromium/Chrome's web-history can be displayed into the lens, by simply installing its Zeitgeist plugin, available in the Chrome Web Store.

A definitely interesting aspect of the mentioned lens is its ability to log and display the downloaded items, too, meaning, downloading the package unity-5.12.tar.bz2 from launchpad via Firefox web-browser, logs and displays the package unity-5.12.tar.bz2 just like a website but, clicking on it, opens the archive with Ubuntu's Archive Manager, as when opened from the usual desktop/Nautilus folder.

How do we use Unity Web History lens 0.4? Open the lens and type a word, then click on a relevant searched&found item, action that will open it via Firefox, furthermore, in order to trigger more accurate results, the user is to use the available filters (Last Day, Last Week, Last Month, Last Year).

How do we install Unity Web History lens 0.4? Add the following official PPA (Precise, Quantal)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:markjtully/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install unity-web-history-lens zeitgeist-datasource-firefox

and restart the computer.

Bugs can be reported on https://bugs.launchpad.net/~markjtully