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stop firefox from keeping download history

  • 4 replies
  • 11 have this problem
  • 2 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

DungeonRaider
DungeonRaider
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Every time someone has come up with a solution, you guys seem to disable it. I've tried setting browser retention to 0, tried changing to the toolkit download manager and it still saves my download history until I manually clear it.

You used to be able to set how long Firefox would save your browsing history and download/browser history was separate but you seem to be taking more and more control out of users hands.

Every time someone has come up with a solution, you guys seem to disable it. I've tried setting browser retention to 0, tried changing to the toolkit download manager and it still saves my download history until I manually clear it. You used to be able to set how long Firefox would save your browsing history and download/browser history was separate but you seem to be taking more and more control out of users hands.

All Replies (4)

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
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The downloads are now part of the history, so when you clear history then download items in that range are included as well. They also do no longer show as history items if you remove them from the Downloads folder in the Library.

iamjayakumars
iamjayakumars
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Hi, Firefox Menu > Tools > Options

  • Privacy
    • History > Firefox will > Choose "Never remember History"
DungeonRaider
DungeonRaider Question owner
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I want to keep my browsing history (seem to have removed the setting for only keeping it for a certain period too) as it can be sometimes useful but not the download history which is a waste of space.

There have literally been 100s of threads about this same issue since v15 IIRC when you first combined the two and people would find workarounds or about:config edits to FIX your changes, but you seem to keep removing the workarounds, making it worse and worse.

cor-el
cor-el
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  • Top 10 Contributor
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The Downloads folder in the Library is present since Firefox 8 (2011), so this is not a recent addition.

Download history is stored as part of the normal browsing history (visited sites/links) in places.sqlite and a special annotation property identifies such an history item as a download item, so you can't separate them easily.

Note that the classic Download Manager did store its data in a different file (downloads.sqlite), so you needed to check both if you had set to remember/keep downloads with the classic Download Manager in older Firefox versions.