See when tab was last refreshed in Safari

Question

Let's say I open a website. I then later open another tab that goes to the same address.

How can I see when each tab was last refreshed?

Answer 1

If you enable the Develop menu, you can view the HTTP headers when you press Cmd-Opt-I. You need to always enable resource tracking.

It's the Last-Modified value. This is the same date as shown in Firefox's info window (even though it's not the actual load time, but you were happy with it before).

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The following AppleScript reads data from Safari's History file and shows a popup with the date recorded there.

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tell application "Safari"
    set u to URL of current tab of (first window whose index is 1)

    set t to do shell script "/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c Print ~/Library/Safari/History.plist | grep -A 50 '= " & u & "' | grep lastVisitedDate | head -n1 | cut -d= -f2"

    if t = "" then
        display alert "Could not find " & u & " in history!"
        return
    end if

    set s to "date -r $( echo '946771200 + " & t & "' | bc | cut -d. -f1 )"
    set d to do shell script s
    display alert d
end tell

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You can use it as part of a Service you create in Automator (no input, in Safari, using a single Run AppleScript action), or as regular AppleScript from the Scripts menu you can enable in AppleScript Editor. In the latter case, place the scpt file in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Safari.

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Some caveats:

• It uses the time Safari records for its history. Simply reloading a page does not update the Safari history record for the URL.
• It does not work with URLs only opened in Private Browsing, as they're not recorded (duh)
• I'm not sure about the offset 946771200 (which is January 1 2000, at 6 pm). If the dates of your recently viewed pages are off by a few hours, add or subtract the number of seconds in those hours from that value.

Answer 2

I don't have enought points to send this as a comment but your question needs to be a little more specific, for example some web pages refresh themselves using javascript.

Do you mean when was the page refreshed (opened) manually by the user? As far I am aware this feature is not included in the browser itself, but you can look at when was the page cached as a temproary file.

If this feature is important enough for you , in FireFox using GreaseMonkey you can run javascript script to leave a time tag on top of the page, hell that way you can have it showing you how long the page has been open using ticking clock!