When Firefox remembers a website you previously visited or stores your login information for your favorite web site, this information is considered your history.
There may be times when you do not want other users of your computer to see or access such information. For example, if a friend or family member shares your computer, you might prefer that they not to be able to see what websites you've visited or what files you've downloaded.
Firefox allows you to clear all or part of your history automatically or upon request. This article describes how to clear your history and how to set Firefox to clear your history automatically. To temporarily have Firefox not store any history, see Private Browsing.
You can set Firefox to automatically clear your history when you close Firefox:
There may be times when you do not want other users of your computer to see or access such information. For example, if a friend or family member shares your computer, you might prefer that they not to be able to see what websites you've visited or what files you've downloaded.
Firefox allows you to clear all or part of your history automatically or upon request. This article describes how to clear your history and how to set Firefox to clear your history automatically. To temporarily have Firefox not store any history, see Private Browsing.
Table Of Contents
- What is history?
- Clearing your history
- Clearing history automatically
- Clearing history for a single site
What is history?
- Browsing & Download History: Browsing history is the list of sites you've visited that show in the History menu, the Library window's History list, and the Location bar autocomplete's address list. Download history is the list of files you've downloaded that show in the Downloads window.
- Form & Search Bar History: Form history includes the items you've entered into web page forms for Form autocomplete. Search Bar history includes items you've entered into Firefox's Search bar.
- Cookies: Cookies store information about websites you visit, such as site preferences or login status.
- Cache: The cache stores temporary files, such as web pages and other online media, that you have downloaded from the Internet.
- Active Logins: If you have logged in to a website that uses encryption since you most recently opened Firefox, that site is considered "active."
- Site Preferences: Site-specific preferences, including the saved zoom level for sites, character encoding, and the permissions for sites described in the Page Info window.
Clearing your history
Watch a video of these instructions
- On the menu bar, click on the Tools menu, and select Clear Recent History....
- Select how much history you want to clear:
- Beside Time range to clear select how much of your history Firefox will clear. You can clear the history collected in the last one, two, or four hours; all previous hours of that day (Today); or all your history (Everything).
- You can choose to clear any or all of the items described above.
- (Firefox 3.5) Click the button next to Details to display what items to clear.
- Click . The Clear Recent History window will close, and the data you have selected will be cleared.
Clearing history automatically
Watch a video of these instructions
- On the menu bar, click on the Firefox menu, and select Preferences....
- Select the Privacy panel.
- Set Firefox will: to Use custom settings for history.
- Select the check box for Clear history when Firefox exits.
- To specify what history should be cleared, click the button next to Clear history when Firefox exits.
- In the Settings for Clearing History window, click the check mark boxes next to the items you want to have cleared automatically when Firefox closes.
- After selecting the history to be cleared, click to close the Settings for Clearing History window.
- Close the Preferences window
Clearing history for a single site
Watch a video of these instructions
- On the menu bar, click on the History menu and select Show All History to open the Library window.
- At the top right corner, type the name of the website you wish to forget in the Search History field, and press Return.
- In the resulting list, hold down the Ctrl key while you click on the site you wish to forget, and select Forget About This Site. All history items (browsing and download history, cookies, cache, active logins, passwords, saved form data, exceptions for cookies, images, pop-ups) will be removed only for that site. So be careful with using this choice and only use it if you really want Firefox to forget everything.
- Close the Library window.
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