Chatfossil

What it does

Search

Matches message text, captions, sender and chat names, filenames, links, and the text of tweets that were shared. Turkish accents are optional in both directions — "gunaydin" matches "Günaydın".

Reading

Open a chat and scroll it end to end. Only the rows on screen exist in the page, so a chat with 100,000 messages scrolls the same as one with 100. There are no pages and no loading steps.

Timeline

Message volume is drawn as a histogram above the conversation, bucketed by day, week, month or year depending on the range. Clicking a bar jumps to that period.

Side panel

For the open chat: a grid of its photos and video, a list of every link with the tweet text or page title where available, its files, and its participants ranked by message count.

Media

Photos, voice notes, audio, documents and stickers are stored locally and open without a network request. Video is off by default and has a size limit.

Links

For a shared tweet, the text is fetched and stored so it stays searchable, along with its pictures and clips. Stored once per tweet regardless of how many chats it appears in.

Filters

By type, date range, sender and chat. Results can be shown as a list or as thumbnails. Individual messages can be starred.

Export

The whole archive or the current result set, as JSON, read from local storage.

Sync

Reads messages first, then downloads files as a separate pass. Stopping during the file pass loses nothing; the next run continues where it left off. A log shows each step.

Where the data goes

The archive is stored in the browser's own database on your device. There is no account and no server component.

No account or sign-in.
No analytics, telemetry or crash reporting.
The extension reads messages; it cannot send them or modify a chat.
Removing the extension or clearing site data deletes the archive.
One exception, which can be switched off: to show what a shared tweet said, the tweet's numeric ID is sent to a public tweet-reading service and its media is fetched from Twitter's public CDN. No message text, phone numbers or chat names are sent.

Full privacy policy

Limits

History before the first sync

WhatsApp Web holds roughly 90 days of history in the browser. The extension can only archive what is present when it runs, so anything older than your first sync is not recoverable. After that, each sync adds what is new.

Storage location

The archive lives in the browser's storage for web.whatsapp.com. Clearing that site's data removes it. JSON export is the way to keep a copy elsewhere.

Browsers

Chrome 111 or later and Firefox 140 or later. In Firefox, host permissions are granted after install, so tweet reading stays off until allowed.