this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
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Firefox

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Well, no. Firefox deletes entries older than 6 months from history and there's no way to change this or to export the data.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

This says its not time limited, but firefox will start purging once it starts effecting performance:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1410679

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I didn't know, that sucks so much.
Though, someone made a post on superuser and a reply said that you can back up the database, so at least something is salvageable

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah but if you import a backed up db wouldn't the old entries just get deleted?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

They said you can merge without conflicts:

Making a backup every 60 days seems to be sufficient to keep all history. sqlite doesn't reuse old ids (I think?) so merging the backups shouldn't be too hard.

But they haven't tested it, also I wonder if once you do that successfully, Firefox will just delete all the extra records at the next startup, so idk

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The entries would still be datestamped and as firefox clears up the history the older ones would be deleted.

In my other comment I linked something that said firefox just starts tidying up as performance starts to degrade, rather than a fixed limit of history entries.

Therefore, if your history is more or less full, and you just import a heap more history, firefox is just going to "tidy up" everything you just imported surely.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also history search is terrible

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, if I'm trying history search, I know I've already lost.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Mine has history going back to Nov 2022 (though I'm not entirely sure why it stops there).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You can change how often it deletes history items, I'm sure I've done that before