Did Firefox delete my older browsing history?
Hello,
I'm just curious as to what is going on with my browsing history in Firefox. I cleared it in March, then didn't use the Internet again until mid-April. Since then, I have not cleared it once. Right now, everything from April - June seems to be gone, and June is the starting point from which my history currently trails on until now, August.
I am the only one with access to this machine, and I do have a good enough memory to remember if I did or did not clear the history, which I did not. Does Firefox hide the history after a certain amount of time? Or could something else be going on? I do like to know that I have my old history at my leisure, so I can go back and check it if I need to find old information/references.
I would appreciate an answer to this, as the Internet doesn't seem to know that much about this specific issue.
Chosen solution
Current Firefox versions keep a maximum number of visited page and do not have a time limit for the history. Firefox determines automatically how many pages can be kept without affecting the performance.
You can see the current value of this maximum as the value of the read-only pref places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages on the about:config page.
See Marco Bonardo's blog about this subject:
You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. You can accept the warning and click "I'll be careful" to continue.
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If you visited a lot of different pages, then maybe the capacity got filled up, and the older items got deleted. I believe there is a fixed number of pages that can be put in there.
Chosen Solution
Current Firefox versions keep a maximum number of visited page and do not have a time limit for the history. Firefox determines automatically how many pages can be kept without affecting the performance.
You can see the current value of this maximum as the value of the read-only pref places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages on the about:config page.
See Marco Bonardo's blog about this subject:
You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. You can accept the warning and click "I'll be careful" to continue.
cor-el said
Current Firefox versions keep a maximum number of visited page and do not have a time limit for the history. Firefox determines automatically how many pages can be kept without affecting the performance. You can see the current value of this maximum as the value of the read-only pref places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages on the about:config page. See Marco Bonardo's blog about this subject: You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. You can accept the warning and click "I'll be careful" to continue.
This is what it said for me:
places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages;41675
And it said it was "user set" and not default, although I cannot recall setting it myself.
So, at this point, am I to assume that it got rid of older entries since the limit was reached?
Firefox will determine what number of pages based on the amount of space available on the hard drive. It is not a default value, hence marked "user set", even though the application did it.
Most likely, the limit was reached and the oldest pages were removed.
It is not about space on the hard drive that determines how much history to keep. The amount of space on the hard drive is probably used for that behavior of the disk cache and other data that is store in that second profile area (AppData\Local).
See the comments in the Firefox source code:
Well, actually, I have had very low remaining hard drive space for the past while, since I've been neglecting to clean up old programs, games and other junk files on the drive. But it's never really been that much of a pressing issue for me, and I've been putting it off for a while now.\
Not the end of the world having my April - June history gone, but it feels better knowing exactly what happened to it. I'm getting mixed answers here though. I'm sure that cleaning up my hard drive and setting the limit a bit higher will change things.