Comment by jval43
16 hours ago
Google Chrome did this in 2008. Full-text search over all visited pages, stored offline. It was very useful and I miss it.
Nobody seems to remember it, even though it was a headline feature. Was removed in 2013, I think due to technical constraints.
Will definitely try this.
Now we have no browser capable of searching in anything - not even Firefox. I routinely try, in several browser, to find a tab among open tabs, a bookmark among open bookmarks, or a history entry (both from "omnibox" and dedicated history pane), and it never seems to find it - not by name, not by URL - until it gets a 100% unique match.
It's like there's a timer or a cache somewhere, with aggressive limit, saying "only scan these top 100 results and then abort if it takes more than 10 ms to findf anything", or something. Making this completely useless.
That's on top of occasional deletion of browsing history past few weeks.
Have you tried searching with @tabs, @bookmarks or @history? It works reasonably well for me.
I remember this as well. I hadn't noticed it was gone until just now, but you're right.
Edit: Found it. Thanks Claude.
https://github.com/ssnangua/google-chrome-comic-hd/blob/main...
https://dfir.blog/history-index-files-removed-from-chrome-v3...
Not sure if the same product. I think the one I used was Google Desktop.
I even hacked it for a company I was working for at the time: I installed it in a machine that had a lot of pdfs from some other client company of them.
I don't recall the exact details, but I did some sort of proxying between the Microsoft Web Server that came with NT? at the time and G Desktop, and then an entire team of first support agents had almost instant search across all those docs. Good times.
Now Chrome can't even remember what addresses you went to more than 90 days ago. It's such a nerfed browser.
Still boggles my mind that people went from ridiculing people who installed Ad companies browser toolbars, to actually running their browser.
...And don't give me the tired "it was faster". this horse was already beaten to death and it was 110% marketing.
It was so much faster you could not believe it. It was a revelation and even though "degoogling" was already a thing, Chrome was so much better than the rest that you just had to use it. Tabs actually worked without crashing your PC.
The risks were clear from day one but Google and Chrome were great to both users and devs, and it stayed like that for a long time.
When chrome was literally first released it was in fact faster than IE and Firefox, by quite a lot, and had some nice features that neither had, too. But that gap didn't last for long.
There was also Google Desktop Search for several years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop
with RCE and no privacy
I.e. like any good tool?
IE5 only on the mac, did this too.
> I think due to technical constraints.
I think due to shareholders wanting new sportcars. The offline pages don't show Google Ads.