Palemoon History Retention?

[FourthDr]

Hi:

I was just looking at my Palemoon history, and it only seems to go back as far as July of 2024! This is no good!! I was looking for something I searched for further back and POOf, nothing! I had a look through the settings but didn't see anything like what Firefox has where you can set how far back to keep history or to keep it forever(never delete any) or only keep xx amount of months or days back. Does Palemoon have a setting like that hiding some place? Or is Palemoon going all GOOGLE CHROME on me? Chrome auto-deletes history older than 3 month which is unworkable (another reason I still use Firefox). I need to keep history basically forever. If not forever I need many years and or a way to save history in a searchable format.

Any help insight into this problem?

Regards

[Moonchild]

How much history is retained depends on several factors and is determined by available memory and both recency and frequency of your visits when the history database maintenance runs (not by date alone). History is not necessarily permanent (that is what bookmarks are for). Keeping all history of everything recorded for all time is not a function of browsing history as there are limits to the size of the history database and memory used by it.
I understand this isn't very transparent to the user, but in normal operation history will retain visit for a long time if you visited the site recently enough or frequently enough to give it more weight. There are a bunch of places.frecency.* preferences that allow you to fine-tune this behaviour if it's not to your liking, and this is documented in pretty decent detail in MozillaZine's KB. e.g. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Places.frecency.*BucketCutoff

[FourthDr]

That just doesn't work! I often remember a site I visited that I thought I was just looking at and after a history search turns out it was over a year ago! Without extensive history retention the browser is useless! Bookmarks are only for saving specific sites of interest once you know it's relevant. Not for random wanderings that might turn out to be useful much later on. And because of the time elapsed, I often can't easily find the site I was thinking of again even through a search. This messes up my research activities! I need a TL;DR version of how to fix that in Palemoon and or an add-on that mirrors/saves all history to a db file that is searchable. For example my Firefox ESR 52.9.0 history goes back to 2015! It would have gone back further except I had a data lose.


Speaking of history, I have/had many pages with google search queries open. Now with the stupid javascript business those queries are being wiped out because of the redirect when I switch back to those tabs! And the query are not in history!! Thanks a lot F***ing Google!!

[Lucio Chiappetti]

Personally (your mileage may vary) I do not like the idea of keeping a long history (might be paranoid on improper access) and use an extension which deletes entries older than 2 days. I have a complex structure of bookmarks (several folders in the bookmark menu, other folders in the bookmark toolbar, some with subfolders, I had even an HTML page managed by a mysql database ... in practice I noticed that most of the entries stored in those places are visited very seldom, sometimes forgotten, sometimes they expire, and in most of the cases I just make a new search. The exception is the current browsing session, which I usually restore using a Session Manager extension.

[Moonchild]

There are some options if you want to try and retain history forever.

Option 1: You can set the pref places.history.expiration.max_pages to a very large number (the max you can use is 2147483647 (max 32-bit int) but I strongly recommend against using that large a number near the int limit as the limit is "lazy" so may overshoot, which means it may potentially wrap and likely kill all history. if you want to use a large number you'll never hit, try 100M (100000000) or so) which will override most of the logic surrounding dynamic maintenance of the places database's history table. Note this pref doesn't exist by default and you'll have to create it.
Note that if you run out of memory this may still trigger a cleanup out of necessity.

Option 2: Set up a private sync server, and allow huge storage on it for history (e.g. 1GB). This requires more knowledge and some server infrastructure but will guarantee retention.

You can even combine 1 and 2. Do keep in mind that syncing large histories will take time so you'll have to dial in some settings accordingly.

[van p]

the browser is useless

whuuuut?

[suzyne]

the browser is useless

whuuuut?

I had a similar reaction when reading that comment! But to be fair, I think the intention is a bit of hyperbole mixed in with Pale Moon not meeting @FourthDr's needs, which makes it useless for their purposes only, and not universally?

[Moonchild]

a bit of hyperbole mixed in with Pale Moon not meeting @FourthDr's needs

Just a bit.

Unfortunately this seems to be a thing with how modern generations approach everything. If there's a single part not exactly meeting the needs, then suddenly the entire thing must be deemed trash and stomped into the ground. Maybe I'm just too much of Gen X-er to understand how that works. A little flexibility goes a long way.

[suzyne]

Saying the attitude of all or nothing, perfectionism, black or white thinking or however it is labelled as, began or is more common in particular generations and doesn't exist in others seems unlikely to me or to be supported by evidence?

[Moonchild]

Saying the attitude of all or nothing, perfectionism, black or white thinking

It's more an observation of over-sensitivity to imperfection, and a rather vicious response to it - and it is a sign of the times if I go by my observations. You can decide for yourself if you want to make it a sociological thesis with listed evidence or not (do my posts have to be black or white perfect too, now?)

[suzyne]

Just asking questions...

[Moonchild]

Just asking questions...

Just voicing my observations...

[FourthDr]

Your both reading too much into my comment. Was not a slight of Palemoon. Simply, history is an integral part of the browser functionality. With out good history, my time browsing is totally wasted. Why search the internet wasting hours fruitlessly searching again and again for the same some things. When I could just quickly search my local history?

After all I know I was already there. So I know it (in theory) should be in my history. But the internet as a whole, you never know if the page/site is still out there or if the search engine will give the same results assuming you remember your original search quarry. And since Palemoon is based on Firefox I wasn't expecting that history deleting behavior.

You quoted an about:config setting that isn't in there by default. And there is no visible UI setting. So how is one to know what Palemoon is going to do? Or even if an option is available?

I just want a stable, predictable, secure browser. That isn't being corrupted constantly by some corporation. I want Firefox the way it was before web-extentions or the rise of the malware/spyware know as Google Chrome! Is that too much to ask?? The real garbage browser is Chrome and all it's derivatives!!! It barely passes as a browser.

[Moonchild]

You quoted an about:config setting that isn't in there by default. And there is no visible UI setting. So how is one to know what Palemoon is going to do? Or even if an option is available?

If it's not there, Pale Moon will do whatever the default behaviour is for the preference is not set. In this case, it will use a dynamic calculation (which is where the "transient" preference value comes from).
To add the pref, right-click in about:config's window, select New -> Integer, and enter first the name as given, then the value

[Bilbo47]

this seems to be a thing with how modern generations approach everything

Also possible it's bots: people who are paid full time to create chaos in otherwise functional groups.

[Moonchild]

this seems to be a thing with how modern generations approach everything

Also possible it's bots: people who are paid full time to create chaos in otherwise functional groups.

If that is an actual thing, then... wow, that is so degenerate, petty, and absolutely stupid.

[Bilbo47]

how modern generations approach everything

possible bots: people paid to create chaos

that is degenerate, petty, and absolutely stupid.

Agree petty and degenerate. But from the attackers' side, it seems not stupid if it seems to work.
However in The Big Picture it is supremely dumb, because it can never work at that scale.

[andyprough]

Speaking of history, I have/had many pages with google search queries open. Now with the stupid javascript business those queries are being wiped out because of the redirect when I switch back to those tabs! And the query are not in history!! Thanks a lot F***ing Google!!

Most sites are full of data populated by js and cdn's these days, there are fewer and fewer sites with static data that will be useful when storing browser history forever like you are wanting. So, even if you get your history preferences working, the fact that the web is growing farther and farther away from static presentation of data means that you will ultimately end up with a mostly useless collection of links to missing data.

Bookmarking will also run you into the same sort of problem - bookmarks to pages that no longer present the same data. What you should look into is called "scrapbooking", where you save static versions of page data that you've run into that looks useful with just a couple of mouse clicks. To that end, Pale Moon has the excellent ScrapBook X extension that you may want to check out.

[suzyne]

To that end, Pale Moon has the excellent ScrapBook X extension that you may want to check out.

Wow, that looks very useful! I assume since it is on the official Pale Moon Add-ons pages that it works fine today, but seeing a note like this:

Compatibility
Pale Moon 25.0 to 27.*

I will wonder if it might suddenly stop working tomorrow with a future update, or are the "official" extensions from here always well made and can handle the new version numbers without a problem?

[Kruppt]

To that end, Pale Moon has the excellent ScrapBook X extension that you may want to check out.

Wow, that looks very useful! I assume since it is on the official Pale Moon Add-ons pages that it works fine today, but seeing a note like this:

Compatibility
Pale Moon 25.0 to 27.*

I will wonder if it might suddenly stop working tomorrow with a future update, or are the "official" extensions from here always well made and can handle the new version numbers without a problem?

I have been using it since the original Scrapbook.
Have many books that are large and have had no problems with it.
Been running the last version from here:
https://github.com/danny0838/firefox-scrapbook
It is version 1.14.7.
I have not run the version that is in the Pale Moon Addons so can not comment
on it. (1.14.5) I had to edit the install.rdf file at this section:

<!-- Pale Moon -->
<em:targetApplication>
<Description>
<em:id>{8de7fcbb-c55c-4fbe-bfc5-fc555c87dbc4}</em:id>
<em:minVersion>25.0</em:minVersion>
<em:maxVersion>27.*</em:maxVersion>
</Description>
</em:targetApplication>

I just changed the 27 to some larger number like 35 and saved edit and
ran "7z a ../scrapbookx.xpi -r" to repack and all has been good in running it since 2019.