Chrome may soon let you filter browsing history by device

Chrome is testing a new cross-device browsing-history filter that could let users find pages visited on a specific phone, PC or tablet.

Chrome already syncs browsing history across devices. When you sign in to Chrome and enable history sync, the History page can show pages visited on other devices alongside activity from the device you are currently using.

The History page gives users several ways to find those entries. You can search your history, filter it by date, or browse entries by group. Chrome also supports history searches directly from the address bar through the @history shortcut.

However, these options do not let you narrow synced history based on the device used to visit a page. Google seems to be testing that missing option with a new “Filter Browsing History By Device” flag in Chrome Canary.

Windows Report spotted related Chromium code that associates synced history entries with device names and types such as phones, tablets and laptops. The planned filter will appear as a dropdown alongside the existing filters on chrome://history, letting users choose from their available devices.

How filtering browsing history by device could help

Browsing history filtering by device could be useful if you use Chrome across several devices.

For example, you may remember visiting a webpage on your phone but recall only roughly when you saw it. Your synced History page can include activity from both your phone and PC. A device filter would let you narrow the results to phone activity, making the page easier to find.

The same applies when searching for pages visited on a desktop. If you cannot remember a page’s title or website, you can filter history to that device instead of searching through activity from your other devices.

This adds another way to narrow Chrome’s synced history without changing how history sync works.

Google has not yet exposed a working interface for the feature. Although the flag is available in Chrome Canary, enabling it currently does not add a device filter to the History page.

The experiment is still at an early stage, and the final interface may change before Google makes the feature available more broadly. The flag is currently available for testing on Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS and Android.