Browser History Tool

Tool Description:

This tool allows you to view your browsing and downloading history from your Google Chrome and Firefox browsers on a Windows or Mac OSX machine. It also allows study participants to upload their records to our server for the research project.

Installation:

Participants can download the browser history tool from here: Browser_History_Tool.air. (Last update: 10/05/13, version 0.0.5)

What's New (0.0.5):

• • Fixed some minor bugs.

  • (0.0.3, 0.0.4)

  • Search: users can search through their records by key words. Records will be highlighted and sorted by their relevance.

  • Filters: users can specify web site domains (ex. www.facebook.com) to block records from those sites automatically.

This application is developed using Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR, so you might need to install Adobe AIR runtime first in case it is not installed automatically in your machine. You can download the Adobe AIR runtime from here: http://get.adobe.com/air/ .

To install the tool, just download the file and double-click it.

To verify whether the tool works for your browsers and your machine, you can open the tool after installation and see if the tool can correctly display your browsing and downloading records from Chrome and Firefox.

Instructions on how to use the tool to complete the task:

Note: We are interested in collecting the information you access about programming, including searches, but you do not have to spend time cleaning out everything else. You can just block the records that you do not feel comfortable of submitting to our server, and we can deal with the rest.

Step 1: Open the app after you install the tool. Windows users can find the application shortcut on your desktop. Mac users can find an application named "Browser_History_Tool" in your Applications directories (e.g., /Applications). You will see a window as shown in the following picture that displays your browsing and downloading records.

Step 2: Make sure that you are connecting to the Internet. Fill in your email address (your preferred email for contacting you) in the text field at the lower right, and then click "Check Email". This will verify that you are a valid study participant. Your email will be encrypted before submission.

Step 3: Make sure that the browsers you are using are checked. For example, if you used Chrome, then the checkbox for Chrome should be checked automatically. If not, please manually check it. For example, both browsers are checked in the following picture.

Step 4: Select a date using the calendar on the upper left. The tool will then display all your browsing and downloading records for that day.

Step 5: To clean up your data before submission, select the records you want to block from submission by clicking on them. You can press Shift key at the same time to select a range of records. After you select the records, you can click the button, "Block Selected Record(s) From Output", at the bottom. You will see the records being hidden from the display (e.g., the selected records for Facebook and Gmail will disappear).

Step 6: Click the button, "Submit A Week's Records", to submit your data in the past week to our server. For example, if you choose 07/23/13 and click the button, the tool will submit your 7-day records from 07/17/13 to 07/23/13. You will see a progress bar showing the progress at the bottom.

Step 7: You are done! Just close the tool and come back to it next time when you need to submit your records.