Firefox
collects a detailed history of your internet adventures. If you want to cover
you tracks, or don’t want Firefox to collect any data at all, you can make changes
to ensure a more private browsing experience.
You
can access Firefox’s history from the aptly-named “History” menu on OS X, or by
clicking the three lines in the upper-right corner on Windows and selecting
“History” (“Control + H”).
Not
only will the History menu display recently visited websites, but also recently
closed tabs and windows. You can also display tabs from other devices and
restore a previous session.
The
items of most interest to us however, are the options to “Show All History” and
“Clear Recent History…”.
When
you select “Show All History”, you will see your entire browsing history laid
out in a windowed list.
If
you want to delete any of these websites from your history list, you can select
one at any time and hit the “Delete” button. If you want to delete everything,
then use Command+A on OS X or Ctrl+A on Windows. If you want to select
several sites at once, use the “Command” key (OS X) or “Control” (Windows) to
select each site you want to remove from your history.
The
fastest way to clear your history is to select “Clear Recent History…” from the
History menu, which will give you a dialog to choose the history time range you
want to clear. You have the option to clear the last hour, two hours, four
hours, today, or everything.
Click
“Details” and you can choose far more than your browsing and download history.
You can also clear out stuff like your cookies, cache, active logins, and more.
If
you want to set up special options for your browsing history, you need to open
Firefox’s preferences and select the “Privacy” category. In the Privacy
settings, there is a section devoted entirely to History. In the following
screenshot, we’ve selected the option to “use custom settings for history”.
If
you decide to always use private browsing mode, then your browsing history,
cookies, and other items will not be saved. You can also elect to not record
your browsing and download history, search and form history, or accept cookies.
If you don’t want to accept third-party cookies, the option is there if you
elect to enable it.
Finally,
if you want your browsing history to clear whenever you close Firefox, you can
select that option and then click “Setting…” to choose exactly what is cleared
when Firefox shuts down
It’s
important to remember that, clearing some of these items affect later browsing
sessions. For example, if you clear active logins, you will have to log back
into any sites from your previous session. Similarly, if you clear out your
cookies, your login sessions will be deleted and you will have to reenter your
credentials.
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