Web watcher doesn't work with Chrome and Firefox developer editions

It doesn’t work for me. When I go to the Dashboard it says “no data” under Activity -> Browser.

But if I go to Raw Data -> aw-watcher-web-firefox -> Open Bucket, it shows the last 100 pages I visit, so it is collecting data properly.

Also, if I go to the system tray, under Modules, aw-watcher-web-firefox is not listed.

How can I get it to show up in the Dashboard and listed under Modules?

What OS?

I now a guy who has verified that it works with Chrome on macOS but I have not heard of anyone testing it with firefox on macOS, could be something on our side in that case. (If it is, what’s the exact appname of the firefox window? Go to the aw-watcher-window bucket in “Raw buckets” and look at the “appname” field)

I have personally tested both firefox and chrome on both windows and Linux though so that should work.

Since aw-watcher-web is a webextension rather than a actual program it will not be visible in the tray icon, only as a icon in your browser.

If you go to the “Browser” tab in the “Activities” view, does the bucket show up as a option on the “Buckets” dropdown?

Hey Johan,

I’m also having the same problem as the previous poster. I’m using the extension on Linux with Firefox and Chrome. Both the Firefox and Chrome buckets appears as options on the “Buckets” dropdown in the “Browser” tab of the “Activities” view, but no data is shown. However, I can few the Raw Data properly, so it is being collected. See the attached screenshots. I’m a professional software developer, so please don’t hesitate to ask if you need me to help debug this!

Can you check the app names of the browsers? (i.e., go into the window-watcher bucket and check what the app property are for both Firefox and Chrome)

Hey, that’s it! I’m using Firefox Developer Edition and Google Chrome Beta. If I add in “Firefox Developer Edition” to the browser_appnames variable in the browserSummaryQuery function in aw-webui/src/queries.js, it works!

Similarly, Chrome Beta is called “Google-chrome-beta” in the window watcher bucket. Probably also need to update those variables for Chrome Canary and Firefox Beta.

Awesome, could you send in a PR to aw-webui? If you could check the Chrome Canary and Firefox Beta as well that would be amazing :raised_hands:

Done: https://github.com/ActivityWatch/aw-webui/pull/111

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Hello, I am using Firefox in Debian 10 and I have the same problem. The app name shown in Raw data -> “aw-watcher-window_debian” for my browser is “app: Firefox-esr”. So, What is the location of the file that I need to edit to add the name manually?

A suggestion: It can be useful to teach in the documentation (maybe in FAQ) how the user can search and add manually their browser if “No data” is shown in Activity -> Browser tab. This is because all distros can use different names for the same browsers and many users could have the same problem.

Thanks in advance!

  1. Go to activitawatch directory
  2. grep Firefox.exe, you’ll see two entries in aw-server and two entries in aw-server-rust.
  3. Look at those lines, they are containing jsons with mappings from browser name to app names.
  4. Add Firefox-esr to those mappings, so that they are written just like Firefox.exe.
  5. Restart activitywatch
  6. F5 in the activitywatch tab in your browser