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Can Autoscroll be Disabled in the History Side Bar/Manager?

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When using the built in history side bar or history manager, after scrolling down and clicking on a link, it automatically scrolls back to the top. THIS IS SOOO ANNOYYYINGG!! Please tell me how I can stop this behavior so I don't have to manually scroll back down to where I was EVERY TIME I CLICK A LINK FROM THE HISTORY.

When using the built in history side bar or history manager, after scrolling down and clicking on a link, it automatically scrolls back to the top. THIS IS SOOO ANNOYYYINGG!! Please tell me how I can stop this behavior so I don't have to manually scroll back down to where I was EVERY TIME I CLICK A LINK FROM THE HISTORY.

All Replies (3)

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I think this is a longstanding inconvenience. I don't know of a way to keep entries in order while keeping history entries in order by "Last Visited" or Date. The problem is that Firefox moves the entry because your click changed the date/time of the last visit.

If you want to view a page without changing the date/time in history, you can use one of these private browsing tricks as a workaround:

(1) Library window or Sidebar

right-click > Open in New Private Window.

(2) Sidebar in a private window

Open a private window (Ctrl+Shift+P) and then open the History sidebar there (Ctrl+H). What you view here isn't recorded in history.

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jscher2000 - Support Volunteer said

I think this is a longstanding inconvenience. I don't know of a way to keep entries in order while keeping history entries in order by "Last Visited" or Date. The problem is that Firefox moves the entry because your click changed the date/time of the last visit. If you want to view a page without changing the date/time in history, you can use one of these private browsing tricks as a workaround: (1) Library window or Sidebar right-click > Open in New Private Window. (2) Sidebar in a private window Open a private window (Ctrl+Shift+P) and then open the History sidebar there (Ctrl+H). What you view here isn't recorded in history.

Requiring the user to open a private window every time they want to view search history unfortunately isn't a viable solution, hence why this is such a "longstanding inconvenience". I understand that when a page is revisited from history, it changes order to the most recent. However the unnecessary behavior of scrolling to the top of the history list is the source of this problem. There is no logical reason for this behavior and it ends up just frustrating the user when they are trying to hunt down a page from the history and the results keep scrolling back to the top every time you click on a result. So dumb.

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Mozilla recently started up a new "Ideas" site at https://connect.mozilla.org/. I think if you have time, it would be a good idea to post your suggested change there to get into the current feedback stream.