Browsing History

[Deleted User]

I use Firefox at the moment but I was told it only keeps browsing history for so long. Is that true? Is there a way to set this to a longer period? 

Do other web browsers keep history longer? 

Neil_Jones

In theory there is no limit.  But in practice the more history the browser keeps, the slower it will eventually become.  In its default state Firefox will set a figure depending on the speed of your computer.

It used to be a number of days but it was later changed to a number of pages, so if you do next to sod all browsing you'll have a far longer history than you would if you were on it all day every day.  See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1172337 - in addition if you have a series of long URLs they eventually push out the older entries too.

This applies to all web browsers, not just Firefox.  Chrome apparently only holds it for 90 days, so most other Chromium browsers will behave the same (and presumably the new Edge).  Internet Explorer can (in theory) store 1000 days, but that's the pre-edge version of the Microsoft browser, which is discontinued anyway in Windows 10.  The original Edge defaults to 10 days but can go up to 1000 (in theory).

[Deleted User]

Thanks. 

So do any browsers record history longer? 

I’m sure they used to let you go back over a year. 

Neil_Jones

Please read my post again, I mentioned IE and Edge and a period of more than one year, up to 1000 days for both of them.

In any event, why do you need to hold browsing history for more than a year?  If there's a website you regularly visit, that's what the bookmarks/favourites is for.

I mean technically your internet provider can see where you've been for far longer than a web browser can, but there will be limited exceptions to access this information, and even then I dare say its only capped at 18 months maximum.

As I say, Firefox can technically go back as far as you like but it depends how often you've been around the internet, as the older data will eventually drop off the bottom of the history.

forgotmyname

One thing I miss from the old Internet Explorer. The history used to be easy to search to find something.

It seemed to cache all the pages and showed what you had stored on the PC with the option of then looking online
if the page had changed.  Firefox loads in the fresh page. 

Neil_Jones

forgotmyname said:

One thing I miss from the old Internet Explorer. The history used to be easy to search to find something.

It seemed to cache all the pages and showed what you had stored on the PC with the option of then looking online
if the page had changed.  Firefox loads in the fresh page. 

Caching isn't as important as it used to be.  That was useful in the pre broadband days when it took a while to get anything but today with always on connections, the trend is to get the latest copy where available.

forgotmyname

Neil_Jones said:

Caching isn't as important as it used to be.  That was useful in the pre broadband days when it took a while to get anything but today with always on connections, the trend is to get the latest copy where available.

Its just that rare time when you want to see a previous page and not the current updated version, where
google cache has no copy either.  Not very often but im old now and it was one thing that IE had over Firefox at
the time, although Firefox beat it in most other ways.