Is there a way to read a browser's history, using Adobe AIR or any other tool?

Question

Hi,

First of all, I'm not a hacker :)

We're doing a project where we'll award points to users for visiting certain groups of sites. Obviously there are major privacy concerns, but we have no interest in actually knowing where they've been, just as long as the program we create can check the history and through an algorithm, rank the site/user.

This would be a downloadable application and we'd tell the user how it worked, since transparency is vital.

Now, with that in mind, is there a way for a local program to access the Cache/History of a browser and make a list out of it?

I've read that Firefox uses SQLite to compile their History, which could potentially be parsed using Adobe AIR. At the same time, Adobe AIR has access to the filesystem, so it could probably check if the usual IE temporary folders have any files stored. If so, try to read the URL they were downloaded from?

I know all of this sounds very dodgy, but try to keep an open mind :)

Thank you all for your help.

Answer 1

Not a full answer to your question, but you might be interested in the CSS History hack. If you already KNOW the sites you want to rank, you will be able to find out which sites the users visited.

Good thing you said something about a LOCAL program, because there are surely ways to read out the SQLite database from Mozilla and IE's history and you can find plenty of implementations using your favorite search engine.
Particularly easy to use are Nirsoft's utilities MozillaHistoryView and IEHistoryView which you could script to output CSV and parse that file afterwards.