How complete is your Firefox history?

[mikeymikec]

If you open the Firefox History window, and type '//' (without apostrophes) in the search box, it gives you a non-date-filtered view of your history (ie. all of it).

What I find odd about mine though is that it starts in Aug 2009, stops a few days later, a few sites in September and so on, about 20 results in 2010, nothing for 2011, skipping straight to mid Feb 2012 then it looks fairly complete from then on. I wonder what's with the massive gaps.

 

[pyonir]

You still have history from 2009? My history is cleared every time I close FF.

 

[notposting]

You still have history from 2009? My history is cleared every time I close FF.

Seriously. My wife uses this computer too.

 

[goobee]

Seriously. My wife uses this computer too.

I'm with you, there may be one or two sites I visit that I wouldn't want the wife to see. :biggrin:

 

[Engineer]

I'm with you, there may be one or two sites I visit that I wouldn't want the wife to see. :biggrin:

*cough* Private Browsing *cough*

 

[pyonir]

I'm the only one that uses my computer, but still clear the cache and history every time I shut FF down. *shrug* I don't see the point in keeping it.

 

[flexy]

I don't clear my cache "because of my wife"...in fact I don't even want to know what's on my WIFE'S PC because I know what a sicko she is

But I clear the cache regularly simply as part of regular maintenance, eg. CCleaner every day or two. Don't want to backup my system partition with 5 GB of po..uhm I mean cat pics in the temp folder.

 

[flexy]

I'm the only one that uses my computer, but still clear the cache and history every time I shut FF down. *shrug* I don't see the point in keeping it.

This *kind of* defies the purpose of a disk cache...somehow...

 

[pyonir]

This *kind of* defies the purpose of a disk cache...somehow...

Yeah, I suppose it kind of does. lol.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

True but these days with fast machines, lots of RAM and fast network connections, cache isn't as important as it used to be IMO

 

[John Connor]

I use no cache and cookies and history are cleared on Firefox exit. There is something called cookieless cookies and when you use no cache and exit the browser it deletes them. You can use an addon called secretagent for Etags.

 

[mikeymikec]

I've got Firefox set up to clear all cookies at the end of the session except from a whitelist I've made, so I'm not too fussed about that.

With regard to the seedy underbelly of peoples' browsing habits, 'Private Browsing' is the modern solution. Mine pre-dates that: Use a different browser for porn (which also allows me to have a beefed up security config for that specific purpose) My wife knows which one is my porn browser, if she really wants to use that, that's her problem

Clearing out a properly maintained Internet cache will make no difference to general performance and will only (possibly only slightly) negatively affect browsing performance. There's no point. I've once seen my Firefox cache grow out of control (IIRC it had grown to about 2GB in size and was very sluggish to use), but since I manually specified its maximum size it hasn't been a problem.

 

[John Connor]

I like how everyone on this site admits they surf for porn. LOL!

 

[Ganiy]

Do you have your 2009 history? I am not the one who uses my computer, but I clear my history every time I shut Firefox.

 

[mikeymikec]

Why have a browser history? Because it's handy to be able to look through it (or type search terms into the address bar which filters first by bookmarks then by history) sometimes to find something you read a few months before without having to search the Internet manually for it.

Is everyone here really so worried about their partner/wife/parent seeing what they've been browsing?

 

[nemesismk2]

I go from one browser to another then i feel like it

 

[ringtail]

OP, please...

A) Firefox / Options / Privacy / History (select Use Custom History) / Keep until I close Firefox

B) Also
during a lengthy session of use, every little while, manually, repeat this:
Firefox / History / Clear recent history / Clear now

Then you'll see that FF works better for you

 

[ringtail]

oh yeah, afterthought...

mikeymikec

also,

Firefox / Ass-ins / Get add-ons / search & install Empty Cache Button

every once in awhile hit that button to clear cache

 

[ultimatebob]

Damn... mine goes all the way back to 2011, when I bought this computer. No smut, though. Private browsing is a wonderful thing.

I'm more of a Chrome guy now, though.

 

[ultimatebob]

I like how everyone on this site admits they surf for porn. LOL!

The ones who do NOT admit it are the ones you really need to worry about. They must be into some REAL freaky stuff that's better not discussed here

 

[John Connor]

Your right, I'm into freaky stuff. LOL!

 

[mikeymikec]

OP, please...

A) Firefox / Options / Privacy / History (select Use Custom History) / Keep until I close Firefox

B) Also
during a lengthy session of use, every little while, manually, repeat this:
Firefox / History / Clear recent history / Clear now

Then you'll see that FF works better for you

FF works perfectly fine for me with a few years' history, and I haven't noticed any performance difference on the occasions that I've played around with a blank test FF profile. I think you ought to test your theory in a similar way before recommending it to others, because I'm pretty sure it will make zero difference to performance. What you're saying is like recommending that people clear out their temp folders daily: Really - no difference to performance.

Ditto for your cache suggestion. The only time I've seen performance degradation caused by cache is if the browser (I've seen it happen with FF and IE on different occasions) stops maintaining the cache properly for some reason and it grows to silly sizes like >1GB.

Also, I'm pretty sure that the FF developers wouldn't have adopted the new history storage database system which by default stores history indefinitely if they found that it degraded performance. FF quite a few years ago had problems with a large amount of history data (IIRC >90 days), but that was quite a few versions ago.

The point of the disk cache is to reduce network traffic and the latency penalty that comes from loading web page content from the network. Logically it follows that too small or too large a cache is going to affect performance negatively.

 

[colonelciller]

storing internet browsing history for years at a time is pretty absurd.

it compromises privacy unnecessarily... same goes for the cache. it is also an unnecessary bloat on the system. If I care about something I'll bookmark it. if you like zero privacy good for you, but arguing that others should compromise privacy seems a bit nutty imho.

 

[mikeymikec]

As absurd as storing anything else on a computer, depending on one's point of view on the topic. My places.sqlite file (which includes history and bookmarks IIRC) is a whopping 70MB. FF's disk cache is manually set to 250MB. I bet those will bring my computer to its knees at any moment (or actually, are not slowing down my computer in the slightest)!

What about the horrendous urlclassifier*.sqlite files, those typically represent a gargantuan 50MB on a profile that has been used for say a week.

If you want to point out how having an extensive browser history compromises my privacy, I would be interested in hearing your opinion.

 

[Doomer]

Dunno what version of FF you guys are using but // don't work in 24.