{"id":384,"date":"2020-09-17T11:17:33","date_gmt":"2020-09-17T10:17:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/?p=384"},"modified":"2020-09-17T11:49:25","modified_gmt":"2020-09-17T10:49:25","slug":"deleting-only-form-history-in-firefox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/2020\/09\/deleting-only-form-history-in-firefox\/","title":{"rendered":"Deleting (Only) Form History in Firefox"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Mozilla Firefox likes to store so called &#8220;form history&#8221; in user profiles. This can be very handy when (re-) filling web forms (so you don&#8217;t have to type in your username or e-mail address over and over again for example). Unfortunately however, it does not seem to be possible to <strong>delete<\/strong> single entries from the history (anymore?). That&#8217;s kind of ugly when you&#8217;ve entered something silly like a misspelled username or a password where it didn&#8217;t belong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"666\" height=\"429\" src=\"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/firefox-forms-history.png\" alt=\"Web form with saved history that should rather be deleted\" class=\"wp-image-386\" srcset=\"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/firefox-forms-history.png 666w, https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/firefox-forms-history-300x193.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 666px) 100vw, 666px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>1st try: <\/strong>There are some options in the Firefox <a href=\"about:preferences\">preferences<\/a> that deal with saved form and saved history content. Look for &#8220;History&#8221; in the &#8220;<a href=\"about:preferences#privacy\">Privacy &amp; Security<\/a>&#8221; section (scroll down to find it). There is a &#8220;Clear history&#8230;&#8221; button there and also a number of options that determine how Firefox can deal with history:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>Remember history<\/li><li>Never remember history<\/li><li>Use custom settings for history<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>The &#8220;custom settings&#8221; option lets you chose some detailed preferences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"903\" height=\"491\" src=\"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/firefox-preferences-history.png\" alt=\"Firefox Preferences \/ Privacy &amp; Security \/ History\" class=\"wp-image-387\" srcset=\"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/firefox-preferences-history.png 903w, https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/firefox-preferences-history-300x163.png 300w, https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/firefox-preferences-history-768x418.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 903px) 100vw, 903px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>OK, so you could clear all history here with one click. Or hide away all the saved stuff by removing the check-mark next to &#8220;Remember search and form history&#8221;. But what if you don&#8217;t want to get rid of your browsing history? What if you like the &#8220;remembering stuff&#8221; feature and want to keep it in the future? Sorry, but there doesn&#8217;t seem to be an option for that. \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Solution:<\/strong> Even if Firefox doesn&#8217;t allow you to &#8220;click away&#8221; just your saved form history, you can manually delete it. Here&#8217;s how:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol><li>Close Firefox.<\/li><li>Look for a file called &#8220;formhistory.sqlite&#8221; in your preferences folder.<\/li><li>Remove that file (or just move it away from the preferences folder if you are too scared to delete it straight away.)<\/li><li>Re-open Firefox. <\/li><li>Done! Your old form history should be gone. Your search and browsing history should still be there. New stuff will be remembered. <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video\"><video controls src=\"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/firefox-delete-form-history-3.webm\"><\/video><figcaption>Deleteing Firefox form history (but not browsing history)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>This works the same way for Firefox running on Linux, macOS or Windows of course. You can check the following FAQ on how to find your profile folder:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/support.mozilla.org\/en-US\/kb\/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data\">https:\/\/support.mozilla.org\/en-US\/kb\/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mozilla Firefox likes to store so called &#8220;form history&#8221; in user profiles. This can be very handy when (re-) filling web forms (so you don&#8217;t have to type in your username or e-mail address over and over again for example). Unfortunately however, it does not seem to be possible to delete single entries from the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,26,9,27],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=384"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":398,"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384\/revisions\/398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~rober\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}