3 ms·

Chrome automatically prunes history for quite a while now. Which I personally dislike, as I sometimes need to find something I visited a long time ago.

justinclift 3y ago
Firefox does the same thing too unfortunately, and it doesn't seem like it can be turned off. It's a real pita for the same reason. Needed to look at browser history older than a few months and discovering it's all been deleted (by Firefox) was a very unpleasant experience. Seems to be a needless data loss "optimisation" (sic), but I have no idea what the real world use case for that would be.
- wackget 3y ago
  Not sure if I've done anything special but I've got history going back to 2021.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Interesting. That gives me hope that there might indeed be a setting to change the behaviour. Thanks. :)
    - alpaca128 3y ago
      There's a good chance an about:config setting lets you change it. FF has a ton of detailed settings but most are hidden. On my setup the "manage history" window goes back a bit over 6 months. Unfortunately the list entries don't show a date, so I can't give more precise numbers.
    - svl 3y ago
      browser.history.maxStateObjectSize and places.history.expiration.max_pages (both accessible through about:config) should be the settings to modify. Do a web search for those properties to get more information on how they interact.
      - justinclift 3y ago
        Fantastic! Thank you. :)
- osmarks 3y ago
  I wrote a script (https://github.com/osmarks/random-stuff/blob/master/histretention.py https://github.com/osmarks/random-stuff/blob/master/histrete...) to dump a Firefox places.sqlite database to a separate SQLite database for long-term storage (I run it nightly). It seems to delete stuff based on some combination of visit frequency and last visit time. I suspect they need to do this to keep history searches fast, since I also separately hacked a bunch of `about:config` options to retain more history and they run quite slowly now, particularly on my phone.

justinclift 3y ago

Firefox does the same thing too unfortunately, and it doesn't seem like it can be turned off. It's a real pita for the same reason. Needed to look at browser history older than a few months and discovering it's all been deleted (by Firefox) was a very unpleasant experience. Seems to be a needless data loss "optimisation" (sic), but I have no idea what the real world use case for that would be.

wackget 3y ago
Not sure if I've done anything special but I've got history going back to 2021.
- justinclift 3y ago
  Interesting. That gives me hope that there might indeed be a setting to change the behaviour. Thanks. :)
  - alpaca128 3y ago
    There's a good chance an about:config setting lets you change it. FF has a ton of detailed settings but most are hidden. On my setup the "manage history" window goes back a bit over 6 months. Unfortunately the list entries don't show a date, so I can't give more precise numbers.
  - svl 3y ago
    browser.history.maxStateObjectSize and places.history.expiration.max_pages (both accessible through about:config) should be the settings to modify. Do a web search for those properties to get more information on how they interact.
    - justinclift 3y ago
      Fantastic! Thank you. :)
osmarks 3y ago
I wrote a script (https://github.com/osmarks/random-stuff/blob/master/histretention.py https://github.com/osmarks/random-stuff/blob/master/histrete...) to dump a Firefox places.sqlite database to a separate SQLite database for long-term storage (I run it nightly). It seems to delete stuff based on some combination of visit frequency and last visit time. I suspect they need to do this to keep history searches fast, since I also separately hacked a bunch of `about:config` options to retain more history and they run quite slowly now, particularly on my phone.