Steps to View the History Files

Such files are mainly Hidden files and thus before moving to the location kindly make the hidden files visible in your operating system.

So, the location of the file where it lies is

1. Google Chrome : C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\History
2. Firefox : C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile folder>\places.sqlite
3. Edge : C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Default\History

This is the location where you can see the files of the browsers where the history is stored. In the below image, you can see the different SQLite files.

All these files are the databases file and every file contains some data. For storage, SQLite is used and we can open it in any SQLite viewer. We will be using SQLite Viewer you can use any of your choice.

If you open this, you will see many tables with some entries.

In the above image, we can see that two tables are present one is Keywords and the other one is visits. Keywords are the generic searches that we have made and the visits are the site visits.

Also, there is a table called downloads which contains the details of the download made from where, stored in which location and all, how many bytes were received bytes, type of media, and all of which we discussed earlier.

Now, let’s see the file of the Firefox. The file name is places.sqlite and it contains the data of history and bookmarks.

Over here, We can see that the bookmarks table is present in which all our bookmarks are present and you can verify it by looking at its entries.

Today we are surrounded by information, and for getting that information we are using different browsers with different search engines. But it becomes the biggest threat that where my searches are getting stored, are they stored on any third-party servers where attackers can take that information or it can be shared with any unauthorized organisation? As this is an important point of concern let’s discuss where and what information is stored by major browsers.