Where does autofill come from?

February 2, 2008 11:38 PM

Firefox Filter: Is there any way to view the autofill lists outside of Firefox?

Where does Firefox store the autofill information? Like previous google searches? Is there a way to view them with a text editor?

I am looking for something I googled a long time ago but going through the entire history of my searches line-by-line with only 4 at a time showing is driving me batty.

posted by M Edward to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

I did some quick googling, it seems you can't do this very easily. The file you want lives in your Firefox profile directory and is called formhistory.dat. Unfortunately, it's in a strange file format called Mork, so you can't edit or read it directly. Maybe if you found a tool or something you could go through and find what you're looking for, but it's probably not worth the effort.
posted by tracert at 1:21 AM on February 3, 2008

Also: here's a python script I found just in case it is, in fact, worth the effort.
posted by tracert at 1:31 AM on February 3, 2008

Just a thought; the Firefox 3 Beta I'm using seems to have pretty advanced search history features. Perhaps you could try installing that, have it import your old Firefox user profile, and see if you can find what you're looking for in that? For the record I've found Firefox 3 to be perfectly stable and usable so far. And faster than Firefox 2 as well.
posted by Jimbob at 2:09 AM on February 3, 2008

One not very well-advertised feature of autofill is that you can hit the delete key when you're on an autofill entry and it will be removed from the dropdown in the future. (This doesn't directly help you, but it might make narrowing down your options a little more faster.) You could also try looking in your browser history.
posted by whir at 2:18 PM on February 3, 2008