is watching you
Search Visualize Annotate Archive your browsing history
bigbrowser is my take on making browsing history actually useful.
Ever struggled to find that one article you read weeks ago? bigbrowser is the answer.
What started as a basic search engine evolved into something more: browsing trail visualizations, offline snapshots, notes, and reminders.
It's made of two components: a browser extension that captures rendered web pages (like a headless browser) and an API server with a good old server-side rendered UI.
It's open source (AGPL v3), self-hosted and designed for my personal use.
Search through the actual content of pages you've visited, not just titles and URLs.
The extension captures fully-rendered HTML and extracts meaningful content while filtering out navigation and boilerplate. Domain-level filters let you skip noisy sites entirely.
It's also possible to customize the content extraction using custom Lua scrapers.
Navigation trails model your browsing as a tree structure instead of a chronological list.
Each trail begins at a new tab and captures the full navigation graph, every click, every branch when opening links in new tabs.
The UI exposes this tree structure, letting you trace backwards from any page to see the exact path that led you there.
Bookmark pages with full-text content included, so you can search within your bookmarks.
Attach notes to any page directly from the extension. Notes can become reminders: check back when that book releases, or remember to look at this product next quarter.
Capture full snapshots of pages based on the rendered HTML, CSS, images, and media. All saved locally.
Content-addressable storage deduplicates assets across snapshots.
Archive important articles so they're always accessible, even when the original page goes down, moves, or disappears entirely.