I use the history in my browser often, to find sites I’ve visited. It’s precisely because I use it so often that it annoys me when it grows large. Especially as I moved my site around, I’m seeing lots of pages that no longer exist pop up in the history when I go to visit a site. I’d like to purge the old ones.<\/p>\n
Tools -> Options -> Privacy has a setting, “Keep my history for at least __ days,” but note that “at least.” Mine’s gone way past the 7 days I have set.<\/p>\n
By entering about:config<\/tt>, I discovered something: that’s called browser.history_expire_days_min, which I’d set to 7. But there’s also a browser.history_expire_days<\/strong>, still at 180. (Along with a browser.history_expire_days.mirror<\/strong>)<\/p>\n It turns out<\/a> that the _min tells Firefox when it can<\/em> delete an entry, but it won’t unless it’s short on space. Firefox 3 apparently makes this automatic, but wasn’t designed for people with a severe case of OCD who want<\/em> things to age out after a while.<\/p>\n Setting history_expire_days (and history_expire_days.mirror) to 14 solved the problem: now things get saved for at least 7 days, but not to exceed 14. No more 6-month-old history entries!<\/p>\n Edit<\/strong>: A lot of people are searching for I use the history in my browser often, to find sites I’ve visited. It’s precisely because I use it so often that it annoys me when it grows large. Especially as I moved my site around, I’m seeing lots of … Continue reading history_expire_days.mirror<\/code>, which is fairly cryptic. This portion<\/a> of the source code was indexed by Google*, and defines browser.history_expire_days.mirror<\/code> as “a preference whose value mirrors that of browser.history_expire_days, to make the “days of history” checkbox easier to code.” So just set it to the same as history_expire_days if you’re changing it!<\/p>\n\n