history

Use the history API to interact with the browser history.

If you are looking for information about the browser session history, see the History interface.

Note: Downloads are treated as HistoryItem objects. Therefore, events such as history.onVisited fire for downloads.

Browser history is a chronological record of pages the user has visited. The history API enables you to:

However, the user may have visited a single page multiple times, so the API also has the concept of "visits". So you can also use this API to:

To use this API, an extension must request the "history" permission in its manifest.json file.

Types

history.TransitionType

Describes how the browser navigated to a particular page.

history.HistoryItem

Provides information about a particular page in the browser history.

history.VisitItem

Describes a single visit to a page.

Functions

history.search()

Searches the browser history for history.HistoryItem objects matching the given criteria.

history.getVisits()

Retrieves information about visits to a given page.

history.addUrl()

Adds a record to the browser history of a visit to the given page.

history.deleteUrl()

Removes all visits to the given URL from the browser history.

history.deleteRange()

Removes all visits to pages that the user made during the given time range.

history.deleteAll()

Removes all visits from the browser history.

Events

history.onTitleChanged

Fired when the title of a page visited by the user is recorded.

history.onVisited

Fired each time the user visits a page, providing the history.HistoryItem data for that page.

history.onVisitRemoved

Fired when a URL is removed completely from the browser history.

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

Example extensions

Note: This API is based on Chromium's chrome.history API. This documentation is derived from history.json in the Chromium code.