Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape Based Web Browsers
Added 30 Jul 2008
Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape and other related browsers also save the
Internet activity using a similar method to IE.
Mozilla/Netscape/Firefox save the web activity in a file named
history.dat. One significant difference between a history.dat file and an index.dat file is that a history.dat
file is saved in an ASCII format rather than binary. This makes
reviewing the file simpler than the corresponding IE file. The second
difference with the history.dat file is that it does not
link web site activity with cached web pages. Therefore, we cannot
readily assemble views of web pages Joe visited in the same manner that
we can with IE.
Firefox files are located in the following directory:
\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ \history.dat
Mozilla/Netscape history files are found in the following directory:
\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\ \ \history.dat
The process of reconstructing web activity manually can be quite tedious. Fortunately, there are several tools, both free and commercial, that streamline this process considerably. The following sections present some of these tools. Please follow along with the web activity data you downloaded in the introduction to this article, and use the tools mentioned in this article to reconstruct the analysis.