Bug on "Remove" button?
I'm so unhappy now I don't know where to begin.
I was having trouble loading a website (lowes.com), continually getting an "access denied" error message. It occurred to me that I'd read somewhere that if you told Firefox to "forget this site," it might solve the "access denied" problem. I didn't remember how to do this, though, so I searched online and found a site that said that adding the "Remove" button to the Toolbar and clicking it would solve the problem. I dutifully added the "Remove" button, then, before clicking it, I triple-checked that the "Forget the last Five minutes" was selected and not any longer period of time. After all, I didn't want to lose everything!
Well, I did.
I had literally hundreds of tabs that I was working on open — they're all gone. All of my history — years worth — is missing. More things may have been deleted, but, to be honest, I'm afraid to check.
What did I do wrong? Or is the "Remove" button buggy?
And while I believe that everything that's missing now is irretrievably lost, if anyone has a hack to recover anything, I would be so, so grateful if you'd let me know.
Thanks in advance.
P.S. I wrote this post up once, hit "Submit," then, after an interminable period of time, the screen went to a blank page. My original post has never appeared. Is there perhaps something wrong with my Firefox (which has been perfectly fine up until now)?
Chosen solution
Using that Forget toolbar button is different that using "Forget About This Site". The former is some kind of panic button that closes all open windows and removes all history from the selected time frame as you should have read in the warning that is displayed and you should be very cautious with using this button. If you placed it on the toolbar then best is to remove it, either via the right-click context menu or via customize mode.
"Forget About This Site" can be found in the right-click context menu of a history item: sidebar (Ctrl+h) or "History Manager"/Library (Ctrl+Shift+H). See "Remove a single website from your history":
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I would be happy if I could get just my history back (I could mostly reconstruct what I had opened from that), but my research indicates that if I use an old backup, it'll overwrite my bookmarks too (and they're presently up to date).
Does anyone have any suggestions? Please?
The proper instruction is: Remove History For One Site {web link}
Open the History Manager <Control> (Mac=<Command>) <Shift> H. In the search bar, enter the name of the site. Right-click on one of the listings and select Forget About This Site. This should remove all information, including any site settings
History is not backed up, so it is likely lost.
If you have sync, and there is a problem anywhere,
Shut Down Sync Immediately On All Devices to
prevent the problem from spreading. Once the
problem is fixed, perform the same repair on all
computers/profiles before using sync again.
[v57+] Places Maintenance is built into Firefox.
Type about:support<enter> in the address bar.
You will find Places Database near the bottom. Press the Verify Integrity button.
If any errors are reported, check this link: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/fix-bookmarks-and-history-will-not-be-functional
The places.sqlite file contains your History and Bookmarks. And it looks like it is corrupted.
Type about:support<enter> in the address bar.
Under the page logo on the left side, you will see Application Basics. Under this find Profile Folder. To its right press the button Show Folder. This will open your file browser to the current Firefox profile. Now Close Firefox.
Locate the above file. Then rename or delete it. Restart Firefox. The browser should then create a new place.sqlite and recover your bookmarks from the backup files.
Note: Your history is not backed up and will be lost.
Chosen Solution
Using that Forget toolbar button is different that using "Forget About This Site". The former is some kind of panic button that closes all open windows and removes all history from the selected time frame as you should have read in the warning that is displayed and you should be very cautious with using this button. If you placed it on the toolbar then best is to remove it, either via the right-click context menu or via customize mode.
"Forget About This Site" can be found in the right-click context menu of a history item: sidebar (Ctrl+h) or "History Manager"/Library (Ctrl+Shift+H). See "Remove a single website from your history":
misc17 said
I would be happy if I could get just my history back (I could mostly reconstruct what I had opened from that), but my research indicates that if I use an old backup, it'll overwrite my bookmarks too (and they're presently up to date). Does anyone have any suggestions? Please?
If this happened to you and you use Firefox across various devices where you regularly sync tabs, DO NOT PANIC, simply do what I did below.
I did press the forget button not realizing that when it warns you about windows and tabs being closed it means you also won't have a way to restore them even if they were not opened in the time frame you wanted the Forget function to work on. Luckily I was able to restore all my 600+ tabs by logging into another device and bookmarking all synced tabs it had trace of from the former device (where Forget was used). Note: I had to make sure they were not connected to internet to avoid any sync overwrite.
Modified by Nana