You can set the sort order of the the history in the History sidebar (View > Sidebar; Ctrl+H) and choose "By Site" to achieve this. You can sort by location in the History Manager (Library).

Hi there, thanks for your prompt answer! Anyway, mine is not an "issue"; this is a proposal for a different way of storing browsing history, not about showing it.

Firefox stores all history items as separate records in the places.sqlite database file.
There are various windows that use this data to display the history.
You can also create queries yourself to create a list similar to what the other so called smart folders like "Most Visited" show.

Most visited uses this query:

Name: Most Visited
Location: place:sort=8&maxResults=10

See this article about the meaning of the various parameters.

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Places_query_URIs

Uhm, nope, you are missing my point. I don't care about a way to "display the history". Want i mean is not having https://www.google.com/search?q=firefox&oq=firefox and https://www.google.com/search?q=mozilla&oq=mozilla to be saved in history as different entries.

Open your history, type google in the search filed, and see 10s of 1000s of history entries that for someone like me are useless, a waste of space on disk (even on mozilla servers where sync is stored), and a waste of bandwidth for my network and (again) mozilla servers when my devices are synced.

I don't know whether this comment will be helpful...

Firefox's places.sqlite database stores many more entries than you actually se in the Library dialog (or History sidebar). Every single visit to a URL is logged into the database, while the Library/Sidebar only shows the most recent visit. So whatever you see in the Library/Sidebar is only the tip of the iceberg of the data stored in history.

As you point out, Firefox considers each Google search URL different (at least up to the # character, what appears after that might be ignored). I personally would not want Firefox to limit itself to storing only the portion if the URL before the ? character (the protocol/host/path) and omit from the ? forward (the query), since the query is useful information to me. (Knowing that I visit Google all day long doesn't tell me anything.) But perhaps someone could create an add-on to clean up or partially clear the query part of the URLs for users like you who prefer that.

By the way, there are some search engines where your query terms are not in the URL, for example, DuckDuckGo, when you choose the option to use POST instead of GET for your searches.

Hi there! Thanks for your answer. Yep, a plugin might do the job, but maybe the option to cut off history in the very creation of the history might be better (eg. save band when syncing). Of course, it's a matter of opinion whether is better to know that i've visited google all day long without "details", or have a very very long queue of search that drowns the results (or from another point of view, i prefer to remember what i found instead of what i was looking for ).

Ok DuckDuckGO and StartPage with the POST option, but take another example: every mail you open in gmail generates a new url, so a new entry is stored in the browsing history. Open your history, search for "mail.google", and you'll have a list of every single mail you've read since last history clean. Is that useful to you? Not to me :-) Have a nice 2014!

You can take a look at this extension:

• HistoryBlock: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/historyblock/

Exactly, that will do it!