Is it possible to prevent the autoscroll in the history sidebar
Something that has always been a bother for me and maybe the solution is right under my nose. When I look for something in my history but I am not sure of the exact link, I often have to clink on several pages to find the exact one. The problem is every time I do the side bar autoscroll all the way back up which makes very bothersome to go back to the position I was before. Is it possible to deactivate this automatic scroll to the top of the sidebar (newest link in history) .
Thanks
Chosen solution
When you click a link in the history sidebar or in the History Manager to open the link for inspection then you create a new history visit for that link and that makes the link appear as first in the list in case you have sorted by visit date. The old visit will be removed (hidden) from the list.
There is no way to avoid that other than copying links to a file or bookmark links and process them that way.
Copy and paste this code in the location bar to open an Edit window in a tab. You can also create a bookmark with the location set to the full data code.
data:text/html,<html><head><title>EDIT window</title></head><body onload="document.body.contentEditable='true';" onclick="if(event.shiftKey){this.contentEditable='false';this.innerHTML=this.innerHTML.replace(/(<\/a>)/ig,'$1<br>');event.preventDefault();}" height="99%" width="100%"></body></html>
Click to the far left of an history item in the history sidebar to select that item, but not open it. Select multiple items via Shift and cursor down and copy the selected items to the clipboard via the right-click context menu.
If you click on the page that opened with the above posted data code then you should see a cursor. Press Ctrl+V or Shift+Insert to paste the content on the clipboard to the web page (the right-click context menu doesn't work). Once you are done copying, you can hold the Shift key and left-click the text to switch off contentEditable mode and make the links clickable.
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Not that I know of, are you asking about the bookmarks sidebar?
Oh so many typos in my original question and I cannot edit it.
No I mean the history sidebar: Let's say I search for the keyword translate since I often use google translate. I get lot of results but no indications as to what my search was and I am trying to find a specific translation again. if I click on one of the result it is going to be sent on top of the search results since it is now the newest result in history. However this autoscroll back up completely messes up with where I was looking before.
I guess my example is too specific for a dedicated option to prevent this behavior.
Thanks for your answer.
Chosen Solution
When you click a link in the history sidebar or in the History Manager to open the link for inspection then you create a new history visit for that link and that makes the link appear as first in the list in case you have sorted by visit date. The old visit will be removed (hidden) from the list.
There is no way to avoid that other than copying links to a file or bookmark links and process them that way.
Copy and paste this code in the location bar to open an Edit window in a tab. You can also create a bookmark with the location set to the full data code.
data:text/html,<html><head><title>EDIT window</title></head><body onload="document.body.contentEditable='true';" onclick="if(event.shiftKey){this.contentEditable='false';this.innerHTML=this.innerHTML.replace(/(<\/a>)/ig,'$1<br>');event.preventDefault();}" height="99%" width="100%"></body></html>
Click to the far left of an history item in the history sidebar to select that item, but not open it. Select multiple items via Shift and cursor down and copy the selected items to the clipboard via the right-click context menu.
If you click on the page that opened with the above posted data code then you should see a cursor. Press Ctrl+V or Shift+Insert to paste the content on the clipboard to the web page (the right-click context menu doesn't work). Once you are done copying, you can hold the Shift key and left-click the text to switch off contentEditable mode and make the links clickable.
Modified by cor-el
Thanks for your answer, so I guess it is not possible. Yeah I suppose I can copy paste the links in some random page instead of clicking on them.
cor-el, thanks for responding to this question but I have to say that while you may have spent some time on the html code to do what ever it is doing, you certainly didn't explain it in a manner that a non-geek could understand. Maybe if it wasn't all strung out in one long line, I could think about attempting to read it. You may as well have typed it in all caps and in the middle of a paragraph that is 30 lines long. Oh and make them all run-on sentences while we're at it.
Sorry I'm being snippy, but I have struggled with trying to keep track of which links in the history I have reviewed, many many times before taking the time to go into the help files. You could read that as wanting to find that particular youtube that addressed the pros and cons of 71 vs T-50s.badly enough and getting frustrated enough at that frigging screen bouncing around that not only am I in the help files, but I'm going to take the time to write a lengthy post about lengthy posts that have no middle ground. Either I can write html or I haven't yet learned to copy and paste. So now you've addressed what, 10-15% of the population, how about the rest of us?
I'm not sure what the proper response would have been. Maybe a short sweet - No, but you could copy and paste the list of links into a text file so you could copy and paste them into the browser address bar one at a time. Or maybe adding a link to a site where I can teach myself to read/write html (assuming that is what the code you wrote is). And now that I'm done ranting and raving, I said WTH, put my blinders on and found that what you wrote in your post actually worked, but you could have been infecting me with a virus for all I knew. And before the final <shift><left click>, I was thinking "oh great, here's the aforementioned 30 line paragraph only it was underlined rather than all caps. Not only that, there's "You can also create a bookmark with the location set to the full data code." I really don't know what you are saying here. What is the full data code? and "location set" - I presume you are using the word set as a verb rather than the set of locations? From the op's reply, I'm fairly certain they didn't get where you were headed with that html.
Suffice it to say, I don't like working with blinders on and since it would seem that you're half way there, how about dressing it up and making it an add-on, plug-in, extensions or whatever the hell it would be. Hey, I'd even cough up a buck or two ninety-five for it. But now that I've thought of it, maybe there's already one out there. If only I had the time (or had taken the time) to figure out which one of those to look for. Yeah I know I could have used the time I wrote this to research the distinction between those functions. It wasn't until IE became ripe for hacking a year or two ago, that I first used FireFox and sorry to say learning the ins and outs of it hasn't made it off the back burner.
Unfortunately my closing remark must be to rescind, at least temporarily, my endorsement of your little routine. As I was looking on the task bar for the WordPad icon to copy all this into a text document, I noticed a new (to me) icon, and sadly it is telling me that Firefox has crashed and blah blah blah, Hopefully it is a coincidence. If you made it all the way here, thanks for reading my rant! Cor-el, I hope mozilla is paying you well to take this abuse!
What happens is that if you click a history item (link) to inspect that page then Firefox will create a new history item and hides the previous history item, i.e. you only see the most recent visit. The workaround to avoid losing track is to copy all history items (URLs) to the clipboard and paste them in a file and open them one at the time.
I also have this same question and have an idea for a solution.
How about instead of auto-refreshing the History list, only have it refresh if the History sidebar is closed and reopened?
How this affects me:
I hit Ctrl+H to open the history sidebar. Like the OP I type some keyword I remember and a bunch come up that I have to scroll through. I can't recall so I hold down Ctrl and click a History URL which loads said URL in the background in a new tab which is GREAT because I can open a bunch like this and then Ctrl+Tab to quickly cycle to find what I need.... but the dang list auto-refreshes and kicks me to the very top.
So is there a way to just simple disable the auto refresh of the History? If so then that's it! That is all that would be needed!! Then just close and reopen the History if you want it resorted by view date.
Please help!!
Thanks Huusoku
Opening a link in a Private Browsing mode tab would prevent the history from getting updated.
You can use an extension to get Private Browsing mode support per tab.
- https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/private-tab/
- Private Browsing mode tabs get a dashed underline
- You can toggle Private Browsing mode on/off via the right-click context menu of a tab
cor-el, Thank you, thank you, and thank you for pointing out the private browsing. I believe it works for me. Time will tell when I have a real need. But instead of using the private-tab addon, I used the stock "New Private Window". I could turn on the History sidebar and see all of the history from the other "non-private" window.
Huusoku, your solution would be really cool if one could select many items in the history, but alas that is not the case. But I think you'll find cor-el's private browsing works.
I also figured out another way - wait until it's after midnight so the sites you looked at earlier today were really looked at yesterday and are now frozen in time ;)