Reporting on Internet Browsing History by Site, Date, and Time

Over the past few days there's been some discussion about being tasked with monitoring users' Internet viewing habits. There are a wide range of options and solutions to handle this, but it can get expensive. I remember being tasked with this once and it required a PC that ran between the local network and the corporate firewall. But, there's a freeware utility called BrowsingHistoryView, from NirSoft, that seems to fit the bill in both functionality and price. It's not a real-time monitoring tool that may be required in some situations, but if browsing activity is suspect it can report on suspicious activity pretty quickly.

BrowsingHistoryView is a single executable that can, when run, retrieve and display browsing history information for visited URL, page title, time visited, how many times the page was visited, the web browser used, and the user profile doing the browsing. BrowsingHistoryView supports Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and SeaMonkey.

By default, BrowsingHistoryView retrieves the data from the local computer, but it can also be used to get information from remote computers by choosing the "Load history from the specified profiles folder" in Advanced Options.

Once the data is retrieved (it might take a bit) and shown in the app window, it can be sorted, filtered, searched, and even exported to text, HTML, CSV, Tab-delimited, and XML file formats. So, if you wanted to get extra fancy, you could automate importing the data in a SQL database, or push the report to a web server.

In addition to the standard GUI, BrowsingHistoryView can utilize over 15 command-line switches, allowing you to automate the retrieval process. Originally released in 2012, the utility is still being updated, with the latest update in April 2014.

Download it here: BrowsingHistoryView