Ps I might add that I may have some sort of a work around in the privacy settings of Firefox - by selecting either "Never remember history" or "Clear history when Firefox closes". This at first appears to clear the history that otherwise appears as tiles in the new tabs, but strangely the tiles gradually reappear - i.e. those relating to browsing history prior to when the history was last cleared. This is very odd, and fundamentally incompatible with the notion that privacy settings can delete the browsing history, and leaves me still wondering where the data is, and how its collection and storage can finally be turned off. Can anyone please advise?

You can delete the thumbnails folder in the location used for the disk cache in "AppData\Local". You can use the button on the about:profiles page to go to the disk cache and go up one level (..).

Setting browser.pagethumbnails.capturing_disabled to true should be sufficient to stop Firefox from creating new thumbnails and deleting the thumbnails folder will get rid of already saved thumbnails.

The "restore all" link has appeared on the new tab even with "Never remember history" selected, and it restores all of the tiles going back to long ago. It is amazing that, when history is supposed to be capable of deletion, there is no way of deleting these tiles, which are a form of history.

cor-el said

You can delete the thumbnails folder in the location used for the disk cache in "AppData\Local". You can use the button on the about:profiles page to go to the disk cache and go up one level (..). Setting browser.pagethumbnails.capturing_disabled to true should be sufficient to stop Firefox from creating new thumbnails and deleting the thumbnails folder will get rid of already saved thumbnails.

Thank you for this advice. I had already set browser.pagethumbnails.capturing_disabled to true, and had already deleted the contents of the thumbnails folder in all 3 profiles at C:\Documents and Settings\Tom\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles and restarted Firefox. I have now deleted the empty folders as you have suggested for good measure, and restarted Firefox, and the tiles have disappeared, as have the undo and restore all links on the new tab page, so maybe there were hidden files in the folder, or something odd was going on.

Do I need to keep the settings at "Never remember history" to prevent a reappearance of history in the form of tiles on the new tabs page?

You shouldn't see new thumbnail getting generated in the thumbnails folder when you start Firefox in regular mode.

cor-el said

You shouldn't see new thumbnail getting generated in the thumbnails folder when you start Firefox in regular mode.

Thanks. Would you please be more specific about what you mean by regular mode? If you mean with the privacy settings set to "remember history", then I am afraid I do continue to get new thumbnails.

Hmm, I think new tab page thumbnails mirror history. If you save history as you browse, it would make sense to see tiles for visited sites (the ones with the highest "frecency" score based on recency and frequency). If you clear history, then you would expect to see those sites disappear from the new tab page and see a mix of pinned sites and "suggested" sites.

What "Never remember history" does is flip Firefox to automatic private browsing. You cannot clear the older history while you are in automatic private browsing. That's why cor-el suggested going back to normal, then clearing history.

To blank out the new tab page, I think some users in past threads pinned a blank page to each tile. This hides them from you, but doesn't affect your actual history. (I don't recall the details of how to do that.)

jscher2000 said

Hmm, I think new tab page thumbnails mirror history. If you save history as you browse, it would make sense to see tiles for visited sites (the ones with the highest "frecency" score based on recency and frequency). If you clear history, then you would expect to see those sites disappear from the new tab page and see a mix of pinned sites and "suggested" sites. What "Never remember history" does is flip Firefox to automatic private browsing. You cannot clear the older history while you are in automatic private browsing. That's why cor-el suggested going back to normal, then clearing history. To blank out the new tab page, I think some users in past threads pinned a blank page to each tile. This hides them from you, but doesn't affect your actual history. (I don't recall the details of how to do that.)

Many thanks for your comments. I seem to have stopped new tiles appearing by selecting never remember history and by adding the preference mentioned above to the configuration page.

I note that new tiles of recent sites visited appeared on the new tab page when I switched back to remembering history, and yet there is no thumbs folder, so where is the data file for the tiles (which show only the captions)?

Thanks for your suggestion of pinning blank pages, but my concern is not my seeing the data, but that the data is still there when it should have been deleted by clearing the history.

Tiles are automatically created based upon the frecency of the most visited websites. This will (should) be empty tiles when you have disabled the thumbnails.

Are you suggesting that you see website images in tiles when you aren't in private browsing mode?

Try opening your history in the Library window using either Ctrl+Shift+h or or History > Show All History. Presumably you only have sites listed in the today category.

You would expect some of the sites listed here to appear as tiles. Tiles -- other than pinned and suggested tiles -- are drawn from your history.

If you clear history, all site visits AND all history tiles should disappear at that time. Does that make sense?

Thanks.

I am finding that if I select either "never remember history" or "always use private browsing mode", no tiles are recorded, and I now find that if I select "remember history" tiles (with captions only) appear and that these can now be deleted via "clear recent history". Previously ancient history was appearing, despite having emptied the thumbs folders and then deleted them, but behaviour has stopped at last.

I note the word "recent" in the phrase "clear recent history". It seems that non recent history was stored somewhere and was not cleared by "clear recent history", although there is no indication of where the history was being stored, which I find most odd.

At the top of the Clear Recent History dialog, there is a selector for the time range, and then you can selected details for what to clear. "Everything" should clear everything, but in private browsing, the history from non-private sessions is untouchable and cannot be cleared.

"Everything" was selected when I cleared the history, and I have now moved back to "remember everything" to clear the history again, and then returned to "always use private browsing mode". So things should now be fully cleared if they were not before.

However, things all appeared to be clear last night, and yet when I returned to the machine this morning tiles (captions only) had appeared on the new tab page relating to sites that I had last visited months ago. There is something very odd going on here, as if there is data stored somewhere in an unknown location, perhaps even off-site.

Hard to explain... if you open the Library dialog to your history (Ctrl+Shift+h or History > Show All History) and do a search in the upper right box for http to show all past visits, are there history entries that could explain those tiles?

Thanks for that advice, which appears to have led somewhere.

When I opened the library dialogue, The history section appeared vacant, but the search you suggested therein revealed masses of addresses.

I did the same in the bookmarks folder in the same page, and got another long list of entries, some different and some the same as in the search in he history section.

So why are there loads of entries in the history section when I am supposed to have deleted the history, and how may I delete them without deleting any bookmarks?

Hmm, it's odd that you have so much history if you already used the Clear Recent History feature and selected the "Everything" time range. I wonder if there is some kind of glitch with your "places" database, the file that stores history and bookmarks?

You should be able to bulk select the list generated by your search (be careful it's History not Bookmarks) using Ctrl+a and then press the Delete key to remove them.

Thanks.

I tried deleting one entry from the history, and it disappeared. But when I searched for it again, it reappeared. I was able to delete the same address from the bookmarks without its returning there. Immediately after that, the deleted address would reappear on searching the history, but when I deleted it from the history again, it finally would not reappear on repeating a search for it in the history.

I have selected a number of addresses that appear in the history when I search it for http, and found none that do not also appear on the same search in the bookmarks. It looks like a search in history includes a search in bookmarks. The apparent implication of that is that if I deleted all of the addresses that appear in a search of http in history, I would delete all of the bookmarks, but for the fact that such items deleted from the history but not from the bookmarks reappear on searching again. But it also implies that the history is really vacant, and that the search was only finding items in the bookmarks.

A little while has passed since any more "caption only tiles" have appeared on the new tab page. It may have fixed itself somehow, but it is still very strange that stuff from the distant past seems to have been spilling over from somewhere onto the new tab page to creat caption only tiles.

Subsequent observation seems to support the theory that the tiles are coming from the favourites. It is odd how they leak back. But it is not a security issue if it restricted to favourites, which one has decided to keep record of on the computer.

Thanks cor-el and jscher2000 for all your help.