Web Browser History Settings
Chris | Live Tech Support | Video Help | Add to iTunes
http://live.pirillo.com/ – One of our users asked if they should change the settings in their browser history, or leave them at the default setting.
I used to think that the shorter browser history… the better! Then I realized that I kept forgetting the names of sites I had been to, and really wanted to find again. If you’re like me, and have a bad memory and/or very few favorites bookmarked, you may want to consider bumping up your history setting. It won’t eat up any space on your computer, it won’t affect your speed or surfing habits. I have mine set to about three months. I think that’s a pretty good standard. It keeps things for me that I may want to visit again when I have time (yeah… RIGHT!) and may not remember.
In Internet Explorer, you can change your history setting by going to Tools>Internet Options>General Tab. There you can put in how many days you want IE to save your history.
In Firefox, you would go to Options>Privacy and tell it how many days you want to remember pages visited.
The only caveat to this is privacy. If you don’t want someone seeing what websites you’ve visited, you would change your settings to be zero days. You can also clean out your cache, cookies and such.
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2 Comments
Dougie
August 31st, 2007
at 3:36am
Chris,
I’m like you and I like a deeper browser history than the default; I’m using the excellent wordreference.com to learn french–a very good online dictionary, with associated forums discussing exactly the things that we students find hard–and as a bonus, the words you’ve looked up are there in your history, enabling later memory-consolidating review.
I’ve found the dialog to edit my Firefox preferences in the Linux version (it’s edit>preferences>privacy) and I’ve maxed it up to 21 days for now. I did find one caveat you didn’t mention–at http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/faqs/memusage.html it suggests: “Setting the browser history to extremely large values will increase memory usage. Keeping the history to a reasonable level is a good idea for this reason.”
You’re probably maxed to the max with RAM and wouldn’t notice but lesser mortals on more ancient machines might suffer.
Best wishes,
D.
PS: your blog + chatroom + log + video format is totally cool and inspirational to me. And you seem like a very nice person. Keep up the good work!
Janis Krusto
December 4th, 2007
at 10:37am
just learning things about my computer came across your video awesome trying to change the days in my history followed your instruction on intrnet option found the spot to change days changed it to 5 days and it still only shows me today this is all new to me my kids are tired of me calling them for help all the time so im trying to learn on my own i appreciate your help