history

Use the history API to interact with the browser history.

If you are looking for information about the browser session history, see the History interface.

Note: Downloads are treated as HistoryItem objects. Therefore, events such as history.onVisited fire for downloads.

Browser history is a chronological record of pages the user has visited. The history API enables you to:

However, the user may have visited a single page multiple times, so the API also has the concept of "visits". So you can also use this API to:

To use this API, an extension must request the "history" permission in its manifest.json file.

Types

history.TransitionType: Describes how the browser navigated to a particular page.
history.HistoryItem: Provides information about a particular page in the browser history.
history.VisitItem: Describes a single visit to a page.

history.search(): Searches the browser history for history.HistoryItem objects matching the given criteria.
history.getVisits(): Retrieves information about visits to a given page.
history.addUrl(): Adds a record to the browser history of a visit to the given page.
history.deleteUrl(): Removes all visits to the given URL from the browser history.
history.deleteRange(): Removes all visits to pages that the user made during the given time range.
history.deleteAll(): Removes all visits from the browser history.

history.onTitleChanged: Fired when the title of a page visited by the user is recorded.
history.onVisited: Fired each time the user visits a page, providing the history.HistoryItem data for that page.
history.onVisitRemoved: Fired when a URL is removed completely from the browser history.

Note: This API is based on Chromium's chrome.history API. This documentation is derived from history.json in the Chromium code.

This page was last modified on ⁨Jul 17, 2025⁩ by MDN contributors.