5 ms·

I do. In fact I already record my screen and steam it to my NAS for automatic time tracking and OCR search. It'd be nice to have a less a less janky solution.

• houseplant 2y ago
  in all kindness, you're such an incredibly niche example of actual usage of this, that only proves it should've been opt-in instead of opt-out. I don't need to know what my tabs were 3 months ago. I don't need to treasure my precious history of browsing amazon for vacuum cleaners.
  • SebastianKra 2y ago
    It is ~opt-out~. EDIT: I meant opt-in.
    • phito 2y ago
      Surely all the computer illiterate people will disable it and not get spied on then, right, right??
  • hnpolicestate 2y ago
    There are two types of computer users in this world. 1 billion tabs forever and BleachBit obsessives. I get anxiety if I don't restart my devices daily.
  • zamadatix 2y ago
    I'll agree they are an incredibly niche example of actually using this... but only because ways to do this right now are incredibly niche. The rest remains to be seen. If there hadn't been decades of normality of browsers storing history then people, particularly those in tech circles, would absolutely flip their shit if it were announced as part of Edge. There would be mass revolts on these forums if it would sync with the cloud. It makes measuring how popular a concept would be difficult as what is niche today and what is wildly unpopular with tech folks today may or may not have any relation whatsoever to what will be popular with users in the long term.
    • ChicagoDave 2y ago
      I have Malwarebytes installed and block all trackers in Edge and on my iPhone. The idea of recording my activity on my laptop is something I could see being useful in a business where I’m billing non-stop and this feature would automatically generate invoices. But on my personal laptop? I really can’t think of a single legitimate scenario. More importantly, I think Microsoft should be demonstrating what use cases it envisions outside of potentially generating LLM training data.
      • zamadatix 2y ago
        Recall gives one such example I'd like it for in the intro paragraph on the feature's page: > Recall’s analysis allows you to search for content, including both images and text, using natural language. Trying to remember the name of the Korean restaurant your friend Alice mentioned? Just ask Recall and it retrieves both text and visual matches for your search, automatically sorted by how closely the results match your search. Recall can even take you back to the exact location of the item you saw. Of course you're welcome to say this isn't a legitimate scenario for you, just as someone might say no situation is legitimate for them to need browser history, but that doesn't mean there is no legitimate scenario for consumers in general. It also doesn't say much from you beyond "I don't like it".
• phito 2y ago
  To me it's weird that people need a history at all. It's always been disabled on my browsers and I never felt the need for it.
  • jraph 2y ago
    Browser history makes my browsing incredibly more efficient and is the number one reason why I copy my Firefox profile on new computers. It lets me find back pages I know I browsed in the past with a (few) keyword(s) in the address bar without firing a web search, which might not return the same results as last time. Like, what was the exact crêpe recipe I followed last time? The alternative is bookmarks but then you need to think of bookmarking the page at the time you access it, but you don't always know you will want to go back to a page later. It also makes it very efficient to reach pages I visit frequently. Unfortunately it also makes procrastination very efficient, with slacking off one character away ('n').