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The add-on "Expire history by days" doesn't work for me. How to make firefox remember my history for longer?

  • 3 replies
  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by John99

pixiemichii
pixiemichii
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Hi, With the recent updates firefox no longer keeps my browsing history for over 7 days. It makes things difficult for me because I could no longer keep track of some of the things I do. Is there any way to keep the browsing history longer?

Someone previously suggested the add-on "Expire history by days". It sometimes would keep the history for over a month and the next day all history older than a few days are completely gone! Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Hi, With the recent updates firefox no longer keeps my browsing history for over 7 days. It makes things difficult for me because I could no longer keep track of some of the things I do. Is there any way to keep the browsing history longer? Someone previously suggested the add-on "Expire history by days". It sometimes would keep the history for over a month and the next day all history older than a few days are completely gone! Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

All Replies (3)

John99
John99
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You are probably best not using such an addon. the ad-on may have the opposite effect to what you intend and is probably totally unnecessary.

Firefox saves as much history as it can, often months (? or even years). It will not save history if you set it to Private Browsing mode, or some custom settings.

It also gives precedence to bookmarks and if you have thousands could could see History being reduced.

If you display the History sidebar (Keyboard shortcut in Windows is Ctrl+H ) you should see folders for months

pixiemichii
pixiemichii Question owner
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Hi John,

Thanks for your kind reply.

I'm not sure what you mean by having this add-on "may have the opposite effect to what you intend and is probably totally unnecessary".

But what Im certain of is that without the add-on FF only saves my history for merely a few days. I think it's because I have very little hard drive space left on my laptop at the moment. But there's nothing I can do about that for a short period of time.

John99
John99
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Firefox keeps both bookmarks and history in the same database a file called places.sqlite. The addon may in fact restrict the options and prevent Firefox storing more History.

Try using the addon Places Maintenance and run the report option BEFORE and after any repair attempt. It may not help but at least produces a short potentially useful report in simple text format. You can paste the reports into your next reply.

Note both addons are by the same person, someone that has worked on Firefox and the author even added a warning

  • https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/expire-history-by-days
    Warning: the Places expiration system works to provide you the best performances in an automatic way. Using this add-on to override its functionality, may create unexpected performance problems and is not needed. Thus, unless you have clear reasons to need the functionality exposed by this add-on, you should not use it.

You apparently already have plans regarding freeing up space.

If you are short on free space on the hard disk History is the least of your concerns. Window XP is happiest with at least 20-25% free space. Defrag attempts will fail at about 12%. Do not use the hibernate option if low on disk space, because that will free up an amount equivalent to the RAM memory installed. Defrag if you can. This is not a Windows support forum, so I may only post short tips and suggestions of where else to try