1988372 - After updating to Firefox 142.0, my entire browsing history was silently overwritten without warning or recovery options, leaving only a hollow 'places.sqlite' file and no restore point, despite years of continuous use.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Ashley Dose]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:142.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/142.0

Steps to reproduce:

I attempted to open up the 'History' option on the menu and restore a previously visited webpage from site history. This bug happened on a Win10 OS with version number 142.0.

Actual results:

I could not find any of my past browsing history in the dialog box/window when it opened.

Expected results:

I was expecting the pre-142.0 History window to appear, so I could go through all the sites that I had visited over at least half a year, probably even further back.

Comment 1

[Ashley Dose]

Attachment: Screenshot on 2025-09-12 at 18:15:25.png

Comment 2

[Ashley Dose]

Again, I must reiterate that this is purely on the Desktop program, not on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet.

Comment 3

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Bookmarks & History' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 4

[Ardelean Oana, Desktop Test Engineering [:oardelean]]

Hello, thank you for the bug report!
Unfortunately I couldn’t reproduce your issue. Would you be so kind as to answer a few questions so we can investigate this further?

• Did you have the ‘Open previous windows and tabs’ option enabled? Or were you using Private Browsing Mode?
• Is the issue resolved if starting Firefox in Troubleshoot Mode? Here’s a link on how to enable it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/diagnose-firefox-issues-using-troubleshoot-mode#w_how-to-start-firefox-in-troubleshoot-mode

Thank you.

Comment 5

[Ashley Dose]

Hello,
I'm not entirely sure what other information I could provide that can help, but I'll do my best.
I had opened up my browser window after restarting my system after an update installation to my OS (Win 10) and wanted to go look at a previous page I remembered having in my history section, but upon looking at my history, I could not find any of my previously visited pages. I had at least half a year (quite possibly more, as in a year or more) of browsing history. I worried about this, so I asked for help and looked at the size of my 'places.sqlite' folder and it was only 25,600 KB in size (since I had a lot of previous history, it should have been far larger, potentially into the 1+ GB range instead). This was with the 'Open previous windows and tabs' option active, and it was not in Private Browsing Mode, as I am the only one who uses this particular system. I tried the troubleshooting suggestions but none of the options were relevant.

This happened after the version 142.0 update, as previous versions before that did not have any issues in regards to visiting previously-browsed websites in the History window. The date I noticed this was on Sept. 12, 2025. I do not use many extensions aside from a user theme, To Google Translate for translating web pages to English and uBlock Origin to block any pop-ups that I might encounter when browsing. I have not used Firefox Sync at all and I have the lone profile on this browser. I attempted to use my System Restore, but that defaulted to after the update had dropped and I had no earlier points before that update in particular. All my passwords and other data seems to be intact. The only thing missing is my History list. I didn't try to restore from backup as I didn't know how to do so.

I apologize for my lack of familiarity with the nuts and bolts of this browser, as this is all I can provide. If additional data is required, I'll try my best to add it.

Comment 6

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:mak, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 7

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

From the screenshot it looks like not just history disappeared but also bookmarks and all the other related entries (downloads for example should appear in that window).
That may indicate either a database/filesystem corruption, or maybe Firefox was unable to open the database for other reasons (like Antivirus or other third party software).

Did you see a message bar at the top of Firefox saying "the Bookmarks and History system won't be functional" when you opened it?
if you go to about:support and run Integrity Check in the Places Database section, what does it print?

Finally please also check https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recover-lost-or-missing-bookmarks for other suggestions.

Comment 8

[Ashley Dose]

Again, I'm not certain how much more information I can provide, but no, I did not receive any message bar when I went to go to my bookmarks/history dialog. I use mostly the antivirus software provided with my system (Microsoft Defender) and maybe MalwareBytes. This computer was a secondhand loan from a friend, but I've never had any problems before the update to 142.0. There has been some updates since then. It seems that it might have been something inherent to 142.0, as I've updated to 143.0.1 and the history is back where it should be. I don't know what exactly caused it, but presumably the new update has corrected whatever 142.0 did wrong. So this can be marked up as being fixed. Thank you for your patience and time/effort spent on the recent updates. :)

-Ashley

Comment 9

[Ardelean Oana, Desktop Test Engineering [:oardelean]]

Thank you for confirming! Feel free to re-open this issue if it’s reproducible again in the future.