How To Permanently Delete Entire Browsing History and Bookmarks in Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is one of the most popular web browsers available today. Over time, Firefox can accumulate a significant amount of personal browsing data, including your browsing history, downloads, cookies, cached files, saved passwords, and bookmarks.

While this information can be useful for picking up where you left off on a previous browsing session, there are good reasons to delete your Firefox data on occasion. Clearing your browsing history and cache can speed up page load times, fix browser issues, and free up storage space. More importantly, deleting your Firefox profile data also enhances your privacy by removing traces of your online activity.

Why You Should Delete Your Firefox Browsing History and Bookmarks

Here are some of the top reasons for periodically clearing your Firefox data:

• Enhanced privacy – Deleting your browsing history, cookies, cache, and bookmarks removes traces of your online activity from your device. This helps keep your web surfing private if others use your computer.
• Remove unused bookmarks – Over time, bookmark links can become outdated or irrelevant. Clearing old bookmarks helps declutter your browser and makes finding useful sites easier.
• Fix browser issues – Sometimes performance problems with Firefox can be fixed by deleting browsing data and letting Firefox rebuild the caches with fresh data. This can help with things like browser crashes or slow page loads.
• Reclaim storage space – Cached web content and a long browsing history can consume substantial storage space on your hard drive over time. Deleting this data frees up space for other uses.
• Prevent tracking – Clearing cookies in Firefox disables tracking from sites that use cookies to follow your browsing activity across multiple sessions.

How to Clear Recent Browsing History in Firefox

Deleting your recent browsing history in Firefox is simple:

1. Click the Menu button (three horizontal lines) > History > Clear Recent History
2. Choose the time range for history to clear
3. Click Details to select specific data types to delete
4. Click Clear Now

This will quickly clear your recent Firefox history while leaving other data like bookmarks, saved logins, and preferences intact.

How to Delete All Browsing History in Firefox

To delete your entire Firefox browsing history:

1. Click the Menu button > History > Clear Recent History
2. Select the Time range to clear drop-down > Everything
3. Click Details and select all items in the list
4. Click Clear Now

This will wipe your whole Firefox browsing history. Because this also clears saved form data, you’ll need to re-enter some login credentials after doing this.

How to Delete Specific History Items in Firefox

You can also remove individual sites from your Firefox history without deleting everything:

1. Click the Menu button > Library
2. Click History > Filter and sort > Sort by most recent visit
3. Right-click the sites you want to delete > Forget About This Site
4. Close the Library window

How to Delete All Firefox Cookies

Deleting cookies in Firefox removes login sessions and tracking cookies from sites you’ve visited:

1. Click the Menu button > Settings
2. Select Privacy & Security on the left
3. Scroll down and click Cookies and Site Data
4. Click Clear Data…
5. Select Cookies and site data
6. Click Clear

How to Delete All Firefox Bookmarks

To delete all Firefox bookmarks:

1. Press Ctrl+Shift+O (Windows/Linux) or Command+Shift+O (Mac) to open the Library
2. In the left pane, click Bookmarks Menu
3. Click the first bookmark, then Shift + Click the last bookmark to select all
4. Right-click any selected bookmark > Delete

This will permanently delete all Firefox bookmarks. Unlike browsing history, deleted bookmarks cannot be recovered.

How to Delete Saved Firefox Passwords

To remove all saved Firefox passwords:

1. Click the Menu button > Settings
2. Select Privacy & Security > Saved Logins
3. Click Remove All

Firefox will then prompt you to enter your master password to confirm deleting all saved passwords.

How to Make Firefox Delete History on Exit

You can also configure Firefox to automatically erase browsing history, cookies, caches, and other recent activity every time you quit the browser:

1. Click the Menu button > Settings
2. Go to Privacy & Security > History
3. Set Firefox will to Clear history when Firefox closes
4. Click Settings… to choose which types of data should be erased on exit

Permanently Deleting Firefox Data

Keep in mind that manually clearing browsing data from within Firefox does not permanently erase that information from your hard drive. Deleted browser data can still be recovered with file recovery software.

To permanently destroy your Firefox browsing history and prevent recovery:

• Use a secure file deletion tool that overwrites cache and history files before deleting
• Switch to Firefox’s Private Browsing Mode, which does not store activity and closes without saving data when you quit
• Use a privacy cleaner app that can wipe Firefox data from disk so it cannot be restored

I hope this comprehensive guide has helped explain the different options for removing personal browsing information from Mozilla Firefox to protect your privacy. Let me know if you have any other questions!