About three weeks ago, right before leaving on travel, I copied my key files (including places.sqlite) from my regular desktop computer's Firefox profile to Firefox Portable. Since then, saving bookmarks, passwords, etc. works fine, but I just now noticed that history is not being saved. If I go to All History, it lists January and months prior to that, but nothing in February (let alone things like Today, Last Week, etc.).
Wondering if places.sqlite was corrupted, I shut down Firefox, renamed the file, restarted Firefox, and did some browsing. FF generated a new places.sqlite, but I see nothing at all in History. The new places.sqlite file is 10MB, but I have no idea what is taking up all that space, because I don't see anything in the interface.
silly question (I find it helps to do them first) - is History turned off?
Tools > Options > Privacy
and check the "Firefox will:" option (Remember/Never Remember/Use Custom)
In my copy of FFPortable I have it set to "Use Custom setting for history" and I have to select the "Remember my browser and download history" box for FFPortable to remember history.
I just did a clean install of FirefoxPortable 19.0 and with the "Use Custom setting for history" the "Remember my browser and download history" option is turned off.
Good catch! That's exactly what happened - I did a clean install, and the options were set exactly as you described. I had never had to turn them on in previous installations of older versions, so I didn't think about that. And I used to copy my whole profile, but since I was installing a newer version, I thought the structure of the profile might be different, so I decided to just copy the database files.
Apparently the developers decided that Off was a better default setting, but that seems a bit odd to me. It also has the effect of not remembering any favicons (after I let FF make a clean places file, the favicons all disappeared, and using the sites did not bring them back).
Thanks!