It seems that everywhere you look, people want to store more and more details about you. And that includes the sites that you've been looking at whilst you surf the internet. A lot of the time this is good but occasionally there are reasons you'd rather delete your browsing history permanently, whether that's in Firefox or any other browser.
The trouble with Firefox (and Internet Explorer for that matter) is that it's messy. Computer programs haven't really "grown up" yet and that shows in the way they store things. I often say that they actually make a teenager's bedroom look tidy and that most definitely applies with your browsing history.
Firefox offers a menu option (which can also be invoked with a key combination) to delete your history.
Go to the Tools menu and select the "Clear Recent History" option.
Or you can press the Ctrl, Shift and Delete all at the same time if you prefer doing contortion.
This will bring up a dialog box that has a lot of innocent looking things to tick and select.
It's important to remember that all the actions with clearing internet history can't be easily undone - the only reliable-ish way I've found is to use Windows System Restore - so once you press the "Clear Now" button you'll have gone past the point of no return.
The top option is the most innocent looking - you can select the time range to clear. This doesn't give you much in the way of options (Google Chrome is a lot better in this respect):
You can choose the default value of Everything - this will do exactly as you expect and scrub all your browsing history since you've installed Firefox.
If deleting the whole of your browsing history is too much to bear, Firefox offers the last hour (which should get rid of that incriminating porn viewing session!), two hours, four hours or today.
If you don't like this pretty much "all or nothing" approach then do the browsing you'd like to remove with Google Chrome which offers the past hour, day, week or 4 weeks as its options.
Next up, it's time to choose the things you want to clear. I told you this was messy!
Firefox will pre-tick "Browsing & Download History" and "Cache".
The browsing history is pretty obvious - it's the list of sites that appear in the drop-down list in the address bar and the ones that show up when you press ctrl-H. It's also the list that incriminates quite a few people because it's used to suggest stuff when Firefox offers to autocomplete internet addresses.
The cache is where Firefox stores local copies of bits of the sites you've been browsing. So that's worth clearing alongside the browsing history.
But that doesn't do the whole job. Would that it were that easy!
Form and Search History is an odd pair to combine. The Form history is the part of Firefox that sometimes remembers the values you've typed into forms, saving you mis-typing your name too often. Which is quite useful to keep.
Search history is the part that remembers what you've searched for. Which is more likely what you'd like to get rid of, otherwise the auto suggest could show your other half what you were looking for as an anniversary gift (or for some other, less excusable, reason).
It's up to you how you deal with that dilemma.
Cookies are another option to delete. If you leave them uchecked, they won't be cleared and someone could deduce at least some of the sites you've visited from the trail of cookies that are placed on your computer.
Active Logins and Site Preferences are also both unticked by default. Your view on clearing these will depend on whether the sites you've visited (and would rather no-one else knew you'd visited) store anything like this.
And none of that will remove any files you've downloaded from your computer. So you've got those to worry about and securely delete as well. Good luck!
If all that's too much hassle, take a look at this easy way to delete Firefox browsing history every time. This simple software will delete internet history properly whether you use Firefox or Internet Explorer.
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