Browsing Activity Tracker

This extension provides a flexible way to log your browsing activity. In particular, it allows you to track how much time you spend on websites. The approach is minimalistic and give you direct access to the raw browsing data that you can then analyze and aggregate to your taste.

In contrast, other extensions with the same purpose often require that you create an account on their website and store your browsing data. Furthermore, they only give you access to an automatically generated report with very little control over how it is produced.

Installation

The extension is available both as a Firefox add-on and as a Chrome extension:

• Install from the Firefox Add-Ons Website
• Install from the Chrome Web Store

To install directly from source, refer to the README files in the respective subfolders.

How does it work?

The extension notifies a callback URL by sending an HTTP POST request whenever one the following events occur:

• a browser window is activated (gains focus)
• a tab is activated
• a webpage is loaded (when you follow a link, or navigate through your history)
• a browser window is deactivated (loses focus)

The body of the POST request is a JSON object containing the following keys:

Key Name	Description
title	Title of the webpage (typically the content of the <title> tag)
url	URL of the webpage
time	Time at which the event occurred. Number of milliseconds elapsed since 1 January 1970 00:00:00 UTC
key	A key identifying the browser sending the request
favicon	The URL of the webpage's favicon (or null when there is no favicon)

For window deactivation events, all the keys except for the time key are set to null.

Example of request body:

{"url":"https://github.com/Thibauth/browsing-activity-tracker",
 "time":1405458411242,
 "title":"Thibauth/browsing-activity-tracker",
 "key":"firefox",
 "favicon":"https://assets-cdn.github.com/favicon.ico"}

Also note that the window activation and deactivation events are triggered by your window manager and vary depending on your configuration. For example, in window managers based on X11, a deactivation event is always triggered before an activation event.

Configuration

The browser key and the callback URL can be customized in the extension preferences. The key is useful in settings where you are logging events from several browsers at the same time as well as to provide some (very limited) authentication. The default settings are:

Option	Default Value
Callback URL	http://localhost:8080
Browser Key	firefox for Firefox, chrome for Chrome