I started Hister as a proxy as well, but quickly switched to the current extension based approach, because intercepting HTTPS traffic requires a MiTM proxy which is much more painful to setup than installing a browser extension.
also what exactly are you using for search? does it support trigrams? how do you sort results?
Now for many of us the browser extension approach is not possible (mobile usage, security, etc.)
My feeling is for a lot of users there is really a third way apart from the MiTM proxy or Browser extension approach. I actually do not want my "personal" / "logged in" pages to be indexed. This is a bit like the MS recall nightmare (self hosted version).
Any way to get the list of URL visited (with something like Privoxy, or maybe one of those popular ad blockers like Pi Hole but I guess they just get DNS queries?) and then importing it with some filtering rules with a nightly batch job is good enough for a lot of people.
The browser import [1] is great but I guess hard to use with mobile...
- [0] https://www.privoxy.org/
There is already an ongoing discussion about the topic: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/issues/387
The currently discussed solution relies on the browser extension, but mobile Firefox has extension support.