Browsing history and cookies play a very significant role in enhancing the user experience on the web. Browsing history is a record of the websites and pages a user visits, which allows for quick access to frequently visited sites. Cookies, on the other hand, are small pieces of data stored on the user’s device by websites. Cookies may hold the login information for some sites among other things.
We should keep clearing the web browser history from time to time. If we do not clean the history regularly, then it can grow up in size of multi-gigabytes. Such a large size of history can make browser slow to respond at times.
To determine how much space browsing history and cookies are taking on the hard drive, users can access the settings or preferences menu of their web browser. While it has always been possible to check the size of history in the Firefox web browser from the options, the new version (128.0) allows checking the history size through the clear history dialog too. Here is how:
- Launch Mozilla Firefox web browser and click on its settings icon (three horizontal lines).
- From this menu, you have to first select History and then Clear Recent History. Alternatively, you can also use the hotkey Ctrl + Shift + Del.
- In the window that opens up, it will show you the size of cookies and site data, or the browser cache in terms of megabytes or gigabytes. If the cache is too big, then you can choose to clear it as well.
If you decide to clean the web browser history in Firefox, you should remember that cookies often contain the logged in status information for various websites. If you delete these cookies, you will be logged out of those websites and you might have to login again.
If you have not already installed Mozilla Firefox on your computers, you can get it from https://www.mozilla.org.