Chrome could soon let you filter browsing history by time range

Recently, we reported that Chrome is testing a way to filter browsing history by device. Now, Google is working on another addition: time-based filters for Chrome’s History page.

Chrome currently lets users browse their history by date or group. The By date view lists visited pages chronologically, while By group brings related browsing and search activity together. Time filters would give users another way to find previously visited pages without scrolling through their entire history.

According to details spotted by Windows Report, Chrome is preparing five time-range options for the History page’s filter chips: All time, Yesterday, Earlier this week, Last week, and 2 weeks ago. A recent Chromium commit introduces TimeRangeOption in HistoryTypes to define the available options. It also adds logic to calculate each time range based on the user’s local time zone.

The feature is being tested behind the #browsing-history-filter-by-time flag in chrome://flags. The flag is available on Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS, and Android, suggesting that Google is also preparing the feature for Chrome on Android. However, enabling the flag in Chrome Canary does not yet add any new filters to the History page.

The time filter would complement Chrome’s device-based history filter and give users another way to find specific pages. For example, they could narrow their history to activity from a particular device and time period, if Chrome allows both filters to be used together.

Google has not announced a release date for the feature, and it may not make it into a stable version of Chrome.