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Firefox 3: Clear Address Bar URL History
Posted by Mitch on May 26, 2009 under Firefox Tips | 6 CommentsWhen you type an address in the address bar of Firefox, it comes up with a list of sites you’ve previously visited. You may want to clear this list. However, finding out how to do this proved very difficult for me.
Going to Tools > Clear Private Data and selecting Browsing History doesn’t do it. Typing about:config in the address bar and changing the setting for browser.urlbar.maxRichResult to 0 worked fine. But this doesn’t really clear it. It just makes the suggestions go back 0 days. If you decide to later change this setting again, it will still display the same items that were in there before.
I resorted to a tip regarding deleting the places.sqlite file from my Firefox profile folder at C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\ Mozilla\Firefox\Profile\profile folder
This step actually deleted the address bar history data. Still items showed up when I typed a URL. I found out they were sites that were located in my bookmarks section. But I didn’t bookmark any of these! How’d they get there? Well, my StumbleUpon plug-in was saving items to my Bookmarks automatically. There are a variety of applications that automatically bookmark items as well. You may need to look into this possibility on your own system.
Deleting the bookmarks finally closed the case on this problem. So bottom line you only need to do two things to clear up this issue:
- Delete the places.squite file.
- Clear unwanted Bookmarks.
If you don’t care to have the address bar history feature at all, you can just set browser.urlbar.maxRichResult to 0 using the instructions above.
Make this one false and do the trick more easy
browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled;true
Thanks for this Mark. I’ve been trying to find out this simple answer for ages – every other site I’ve read just refer to the clear history method, which doesn’t work. Thanks again – I wish you were at the top of Google for this!
This seems to have have fixed the problem – but:
The file name is misspelled. It’s “places.sqlite”
I renamed it to “places.sqlite.old” and restarted Firefox.
It did what mark Harris said it would – Deleted newer bookmarks.
I closed Firefox and went back, deleted the new “places.sqlite” file that it created and renamed the “places.sqlite.old” file to “places.sqlite”.
When I restarted Firefox my bookmarks came back, but the urls were still gone!
Looks like Mozilla would include a way to do this more easily.
(I also learned how to backup my bookmarks – Thanks Mark)
thank you so much, i done.
Tried this, and it deleted my bookmarks back to the time of my last backup (unfortunately 3 months ago). File recovery software couldn’t get it back as the new version must have overwritten the old one. I’m not a complete newbie (apart from forgetting to backup), so try with caution!
In Vista, this location is: C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\Profile Name