If you cleared your history you don't have it any more. You can restore your bookmarks from a previous day as Firefox does backup your bookmarks one time per day if you used Firefox that day like early in the morning. Your bookmarks and browsing history are stored in places.sqlite, so if you have your own backup file it would be in your profile, you can follow steps to rename or delete places.sqlite and the journal if present, restore your backup places.sqlite and then restore you latest bookmarks backup if it is later than your own backup. If you are sure you deleted your history and have a backup of places.sqlite, then rename files rather than deleting but as indicated in "Damaged Places database" in the following which will provide additional information. * http://kb.mozillazine.org/Locked_or_damaged_places.sqlite Firefox expanded their definition of history to include a lot more than browsing history: so they include cookies, bookmarks, cache, form history, etc. to fit in with what is not retained if you are in private browsing mode. Here is what I use, you will notice that I only clear cache, because Firefox hasn't worked very well with cache in the past, it slows down Firefox, and I don't want to backup cache when I back up my profile. I also don't have the cache in my profile either ... '''Not saving History''' (Tools -> options -> Privacy), make sure you are saving your history in the privacy options, and also not clearing in "Settings for Clearing History" * http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/4928/clearcachew.png ---- If you want to remove some individual history items you can use the "Del" key ("Shift+Del" on Mac) within the AwesomeBar drop-down results to permanently remove a single history item -- it will not delete a bookmark, so bookmarks you would continue to see next time. If you want to permanently remove a lot of google searches and other things you are not interested in seeing again you can selectively remove them from your browsing history, see * http://kb.mozillazine.org/Viewing_the_browsing_history_-_Firefox If you want to temporarily restrict what you see in the AwesomeBar (internal) search see * http://kb.mozillazine.org/Location_Bar_search