Reviews for Regex History Filter
Regex History Filter by chzesa
1 review
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 15251161, 3 years agoThere are hundreds of thousands of irrelevant entries in my Firefox history; current method to get rid of those is to open History, pick Manage History, then a time period, sort by URL and manually select the addresses to be deleted.
An automated way to search for superfluous URLs would be useful, and the Regex History Filter sounds like just what's needed.
Unfortunately I'm really old, like 65+ years of age, and not too bright anymore; therefore need really clear written instructions on what to include in the URL box and why; for example if a dot acts as a wildcard then please state so in your instructions, and next to that include how to prevent this, perhaps be placing a \ in front of it.
Next : https:// seems to need to be removed, but then please state in words whether www. needs to be included or not : should www\. be included?
Have set various Rules, both with and without www\. , and suffixes like /nl /saved and other elements :
The upshot is that the history items to be removed stay in, which makes this a useless extension - at least useless without proper newbie / naïve computer user documentation.
So two stars for the programming effort, but nil for the documentation makes one star only.
Would be happy to change review if someone as ignorant like could use it.Developer response
posted 3 years agoHello,
as per the title and description of the addon, regular expressions are used to evaluate the urls, and all the contents of the input fields are treated as such. Information on regular expressions is widely available, here are a couple resources:
Mozilla Developer Network: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guide/Regular_Expressions/Cheatsheet
An interactive tool: https://regexr.com/
As for your question, a regular expression matches a string (in this case, a url) if it matches any portion of the string. Therefore, entering "mozilla" in the url field would match all Mozilla domains, as well as any other url containing that word, such as, for example, a news article about mozilla with a portion of the title in the url. The expressions need only be long and comprehensive enough to disambiguate between intended and unintended matches.
Clicking on the eye icon of a given rule performs a dry run for that rule and displays the would-be changes to your browsing history in a new tab.
I hope this helps.