In this tutorial, I will show you how to extract browsing history from Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge in Windows operating systems using DB Browser for SQLite and Python.
1. History file location
# Chrome
C:\Users\<YourUsername>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\History
# Firefox
C:\Users\<YourUsername>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<ProfileName>\places.sqlite
# Edge
C:\Users\<YourUsername>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Default\History
2. DB Browser for SQLite
If the browser is currently running, we need to copy the history file to elsewhere to avoid getting the error "database is locked".
File -> Open Database Read Only
In Chrome, the urls table contains all visited URLs and its timestamps.
Using custom SQL query for better readability.
-- Chrome & Edge
SELECT
datetime(last_visit_time/1000000-11644473600, "unixepoch") as last_visited,
url,
title,
visit_count
FROM urls ORDER BY last_visit_time DESC;
-- Firefox
SELECT
datetime(moz_historyvisits.visit_date/1000000,'unixepoch'),
moz_places.url,
moz_places.title
FROM
moz_places,
moz_historyvisits
WHERE
moz_places.id = moz_historyvisits.place_id;
3. Python Implementation
The following Python script will export the specific browsing history into a csv file.
import sqlite3
import csv
import os
# Define the path to the History file
history_path = r"C:\Users\<YourUsername>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\History"
conn = sqlite3.connect(history_path)
cursor = conn.cursor()
cursor.execute("SELECT datetime(last_visit_time/1000000-11644473600, 'unixepoch') as last_visited, url, title, visit_count FROM urls ORDER BY last_visit_time DESC;")
rows = cursor.fetchall()
output_csv_path = "history_urls.csv"
# Write the data to a CSV file
with open(output_csv_path, "w", newline='', encoding="utf-8") as csvfile:
csvwriter = csv.writer(csvfile)
csvwriter.writerow(["last_visit", "url", "title", "visit_count"])
csvwriter.writerows(rows)
conn.close()
print(f"Data exported successfully to {output_csv_path}")
