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Comment by justinclift | Hacker News Reader

Firefox does the same thing too unfortunately, and it doesn't seem like it can be turned off.

It's a real pita for the same reason. Needed to look at browser history older than a few months and discovering it's all been deleted (by Firefox) was a very unpleasant experience.

Seems to be a needless data loss "optimisation" (sic), but I have no idea what the real world use case for that would be.

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I wrote a script (https://github.com/osmarks/random-stuff/blob/master/histrete...) to dump a Firefox places.sqlite database to a separate SQLite database for long-term storage (I run it nightly). It seems to delete stuff based on some combination of visit frequency and last visit time.

I suspect they need to do this to keep history searches fast, since I also separately hacked a bunch of `about:config` options to retain more history and they run quite slowly now, particularly on my phone.

Not sure if I've done anything special but I've got history going back to 2021.

Interesting. That gives me hope that there might indeed be a setting to change the behaviour. Thanks. :)

There's a good chance an about:config setting lets you change it. FF has a ton of detailed settings but most are hidden.

On my setup the "manage history" window goes back a bit over 6 months. Unfortunately the list entries don't show a date, so I can't give more precise numbers.

browser.history.maxStateObjectSize and places.history.expiration.max_pages (both accessible through about:config) should be the settings to modify. Do a web search for those properties to get more information on how they interact.

Fantastic! Thank you. :)

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