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After upgrading to Firefox 3.6.11, the browser does not see my previous browsing history, and does not save new history. places.sqlite is still in place. Is there a way to fix this without erasing previous history?

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  • Last reply by holvorcem

holvorcem
holvorcem
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Bookmarks are still being updated and saved. Recently closed tabs, Recently closed windows are being recorded as they should. I have a single .json file on my profile directory, search.json. I don't know if there should be another one for the browsing history. It looks like some index file for the history database was lost or corrupted, or re-created as an empty file. places.sqlite-journal has zero bytes; places.sqlite-stmtjrnl has 37 kbytes, date 2008-07-15.

Bookmarks are still being updated and saved. Recently closed tabs, Recently closed windows are being recorded as they should. I have a single .json file on my profile directory, search.json. I don't know if there should be another one for the browsing history. It looks like some index file for the history database was lost or corrupted, or re-created as an empty file. places.sqlite-journal has zero bytes; places.sqlite-stmtjrnl has 37 kbytes, date 2008-07-15.

All Replies (3)

cor-el
cor-el
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  • Top 10 Contributor
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  • Make sure that the History is set to at least 1 day: Tools > Options > Privacy > History: "Remember visited pages for at least"
  • Make sure that you do not start Firefox in Private Browsing mode (Tools > Stop Private Browsing is grayed, see Private Browsing - Use Firefox without saving history)
  • To see History and Cookie settings in Tools > Options > Privacy, choose the setting "Firefox will: Use custom settings for history"

You can look at these prefs on the about:config page.

See http://kb.mozillazine.org/about%3Aconfig

holvorcem
holvorcem Question owner
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Thanks for the suggestions, but they did not solve the problem. I was already using the settings you suggested. I looked at about:config and had long expiration times for history (both history_expire_days and history_expire_days_min). The only parameter in about:config which looked like it might be relevant is browser.history.showSessions. This was set to False, and I changed it to True, and restarted Firefox, but the problem persisted.

holvorcem
holvorcem Question owner
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I kept trying to solve this problem, and after a few unsuccessful attempts, the only thing which worked was uninstalling Firefox (keeping all my customizations) and then reinstalling Firefox 3.6.10 (which is apparently no longer available at mozilla.org, but which I could easily find at filehippo.com). The unsuccessful attempts I made were: (1) Install Firefox 4 beta; (2) uninstall Firefox 4 beta, Firefox 3.6.11 (in both uninstalls, keeping my customizations), and reinstall Firefox 3.6.11.

So right now I am stuck at Firefox 3.6.10, or I will loose access to my browsing history. If anyone at Mozilla.org is reading this, I would suggest taking a look at this issue to see if it can be reproduced and fixed. I am running Windows XP (fully updated), Brazilian Portuguese version.