My history keeps getting deleted!
My history keeps getting deleted. When I look in my history from time to time I notice that it only goes back a few months. This has been happening for about 2 years now I think. First I thought maybe I had caused it somehow, or it was some random fluke, but it keeps happening consistently now, even when I create new profiles. I just looked and it seems my history was deleted in June as there is nothing before June. Can anyone explain what is happening?
I'm certain this is a bug in Firefox, and a very irritating one at that. With history that only goes back 3 months (out of a total 10 years I've been using Firefos) that means out of every 40 "new" links I click on, only 1 will actually be new and the rest I will have seen at some point in the past. This is both time-wasting and extremely disconcerting!
I have another question: is there any way to merge multiple history files together? I ask because I backup my Firefox profile all the time, so all the history from the last 10 years is there in old history files, I just wouldn't have a clue how to consolidate it?
All Replies (6)
Try the following:
- Go to the Firefox options
- Select the Privacy tab
- Select Remember history
I apologize if you have already tried this solution.
Try the following:
- Go to
about:configin Firefox - Find the string
places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages - Change this strings value to a really high number
Changing the places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages pref won't help. This is a read-only pref that gives an impression of how many page visits Firefox stores.
Current Firefox versions do not have a time limit for the history.
Firefox determines automatically how many pages can be kept without affecting the performance.
You can see the current value via the read-only pref places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages on the about:config page.
See Marco Bonardo's blog about this:
So the maximum number of pages in history is 80,297 and that can't be changed? That is terrible news.
Two further questions:
1) If History isn't to help you know what links you've already visited (since there is no way to know if a blue link is visited or not), then what is History actually for?
2) So the retention limit for History is designed to "speed up" performance? Isn't the opposite true for many people? We click 40 blue links and it turns out we've already seen 39 of them. So that "speed improvement" actually slows us down in our work? Therefore shouldn't people be able to change the retention based on how they work? Or at least specify certain sites where full history retention is absolutely critical?
You can read the comments in the source code to get an impression of how it works.
On most webpages, if you click a link it will turn purple (unless specified by the web server). The history is actually to help you find pages that you have visited in the past.
Example
You visited a cool website, but forgot to favourite it and can't remember what it is called.
You can use your browser's history to locate and load the page.
"Speeding up your performance" has nothing to do with helping you to find things on the web faster. This simply means that the computer will run the program faster (loading websites and programs) since it has less files to load with the program.
In most cases the speed increases only a little and really has no extreme effect on your computer's overall speed and efficiency.