how to get the old history limit back in Firefox

[marko]

In the old days, Firefox allowed you to set an upper time limit to the URL history list. Now in Firefox 8 and higher I don't see how to do this. When I look in History->Show All History the history goes back months and months. I don't want that, I'd prefer for URLs to fall off the end of the list at a shorter time like one month. I've looked in about:config for history related options to get that changed but nothing stands out. Is this just not possible anymore?

[DBelton]

you can try going into the about:config page

and create the key browser.history_expire_days if it doesn't already exist and set that to the number of days you wish to keep. (I believe the default is 180.)

you can also set/create the key browser.history_expire_days_min to set the minimum number of days to keep (I think the default for this is 90)

Edit:

Forgot to mention that if you have to create those keys.. the type is Integer

One more Edit:

I found this list of about:config entries that lists the valid options:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries

[marko]

That would explain it, there was no browser.history_expire_days value. It sure is a weird way to do things, I would prefer that mozilla gray out valid options in the about:config that aren't used (ie that are taking the default)

UPDATE:
does not seem to work, after fixing it with about:config, the next time firefox is stopped and restarted, the option is removed from the prefs.js file

[Dutchy]

Since FF4 the expiring of history has been changed from a certain amount of days to a certain amount of pages.
Summary:

Since version 4.0 the history has become dynamical instead of user defined.
Instead of limiting the history to a certain date it is now limited to a maximum amount of pages to be remembered.

You can check at how many pages Firefox has determined to set this figure to.
places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages:
This number depends on the specifications of the computer hardware and is most likely something far above the 50000.
This key defines at how many pages the oldest ones are started to being thrown away.

In order to gain some control back the following integer key can be defined:
places.history.expiration.max_pages:
An amount of 10000 pages should be just about right.
Now only 10000 pages will be remembered which represents a couple of months of browsing (depending on your usage of course) and means better privacy and a slight performance boost (especially when you browse through the whole history list).

The above will work and should be fine for most.

At the bottom of that page there's a link to some add-ons which should bring back the old behavior.

[DBelton]

Now that is crappy

the browser.history_expire_days used to work, but now I get the same results.

I don't care diddly squat about the number of pages, I care about the number of days... My browsing habits are varied, so a number of pages wouldn't give me anything even close to consistent results.

Whoever dropped number of days in favor of maximum number of pages needs to be recruited to the Gnome shell team because he would fit right in over there.

What I see that would work out the best is a max number of days, plus a max number of pages, That way you could set the limits however you wished. You could keep 7 days or if it went over the max pages set, it would keep less.

2 max settings, both controlling the number of history entries. To me, that would be about the only time I would have a use for max number of pages.

[marko]

Ok, The new 'expire my number of pages' behavior isn't what I wanted so I went with the plugin
thanks

UPDATE-
I really don't get Firefox's design any more, if I go into about:config and the use the mouse menu to select "Modify" and put in a new value for a variable (in my case places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pa ges to change it from the default of 103441 to 50000), the new value doesn't take and the old 103441 value just stays. But if I try another value I've changed over and over in the past (network.dns.disableIPv6) that one changes just fine. Why are some set in stone and others are not?