Help me track where I spend my surfing time

August 23, 2009 1:41 PM

I'm looking for a Firefox extension (compatible with 3.5) that will show me how much time I spend on a given website per day/week.

I do not want:

• To block sites at a specific time/for a specific period.
• A desktop application (I want the extension to run solely in Firefox, so I can use it in Firefox Portable).
• The extension to report my surfing data back to a website. I strongly prefer the data cached locally, but I'm prepared to be flexible on this.
• To have to start a timer counting manually when I visit a site. I want it to be completely transparent until I view the data.

I've looked at Pageaddict, which doesn't work on Firefox 3.5 and is apparently abandoned by it's owner, 8aweek, which is no longer supported, Leechblock, which doesn't offer the functionality I want, Timetracker, which shows only the time spent for the browser as a whole, not for specific sites & MeeTimer, which isn't updated for 3.5, and doesn't appear to offer fine-grained enough control over sites. Pageaddict and 8aweek appear closest in functionality to what I want.

I want to be able to see at a glance that I've spent 3h47m on Metafilter this week and visited 41 times. Is there an extension that will allow me to do this?

posted by Solomon to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Slife will do this, although I feel like it slows my computer down when I'm doing intensive work.
posted by suedehead at 2:43 PM on August 23

Slife seems like overkill for what I need. It's just Firefox that I want to track, not everything.
posted by Solomon at 3:12 PM on August 23

You have already ruled out so many extension. The only closest thing I found is this about:me extension . It doesn't show you how much time is spent on a particular site but it does show how many times a certain site has been visited altogether, or during a given hour.
posted by Danniman at 3:43 PM on August 23

It's not an extension, and it's not free, but RescueTime does exactly what you want (and more).
posted by sachinag at 6:17 PM on August 23

OK, I lied. RescueTime Solo actually is free.
posted by sachinag at 6:18 PM on August 23

I came in here to suggest about:me as well. Lifehacker mentioned it recently.
posted by deezil at 9:50 PM on August 23

Don't rule out PageAddict. Install Nightly Tester Tools, and use it to override the compatibility check and make it work on Firefox 3.5.
posted by ecmendenhall at 12:38 AM on August 24

Rescuetime isn't suitable, because I want this to run within Firefox, so that I can use it on a thumbdrive. Pageaddict is dead. It's been abandoned by it's owner, apparently, and the website is throwing up 502 Bad Gateway errors. :(
posted by Solomon at 1:35 AM on August 24