How to Clean Your Internet History in Firefox

Consider this - you are sharing a computer at home, there aren’t any separate user logins and all family members use the same Firefox browser to surf the web. How do you make sure that people don’t get to know about the websites you visited last night?

In other words, how can you selectively clear such tracks from the Firefox browser without deleting the entire web browsing history?

Forget about this Site

This option is recommended if you want to erase only a couple of websites from your browser’s history.

clean history in firefox

Press Ctrl+H to access your web history in the Firefox sidebar, type some characters in the search box to find the website(s) that you want to remove, right click and select the “Forget About This Site” option as shown in the screenshot.

This option lets you delete either entire domains (like google.com) or even sub-domains (like images.google.com) from your browser history.

*If you like to selectively delete only a couple of web pages from the history (and not the entire website), just right click the web page title in the History box and select Delete This Page or hit the Del key on your keyboard.

Clear History from the Last Hour

Your family members have gone shopping and you therefore spent the last two hours browsing the 18+ web. Fine but how you do make sure that all the tracks are erased before the door bell rings.

clear recent history in Firefox

Simple. Press Ctrl+Shift+Del in Firefox to open the “Clear Recent History” dialog and select “the last two hours” or “my history for today” option. This will delete only your recent Internet history while leaving the old data untouched so your wife will still quickly access all her previously visited sites from the address bar.

Browse Privately in Firefox

Now in situations where you don’t want to take the risk of deleting history, activate the private browsing mode in Firefox by typing about:privatebrowsing in the address bar (or choose Private Browser from the Tools menu).

This is the safest option because none of your web activities will be recorded anywhere. The private mode is turned off automatically as soon you close the browser window.

firefox private browsing

Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

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