Securely deleting History in Firefox 3

[Robbie]

As well as using CCleaner, I also use Eraser for deleting certain files and folders using the On Demand feature of that program. I don't always want to delete everything that CCleaner takes care of but rather sometimes just specific items.

 

Twice a day I run Eraser to securely delete the following files and folders for Firefox 2

 

cache

history.dat

cookies

 

and sometimes downloads and signons

 

However, upon upgrading to Firefox 3 I now find that the history.dat file has vanished, replaced by places.sqlite which also is the replacement for the bookmarks file. So two different files have been amalgamated into this new file. Of course this means that I can no longer securely delete my browsing history unless I run CCleaner (which does do the job) but that means unticking all the other boxes for other applications. Or using Firefox's own feature to delete browsing history - but that isn't a secure delete. The other alternative is to delete places.sqlite itself, but then any bookmarks saved after upgrading to FF3 are also deleted (the old bookmarks file for FF2 remains so all the old bookmarks stay as once places.sqlite is recreated it imports them once again).

 

Does anyone know if it is possible to somehow delete the history without deleting bookmarks - for example, how does CCleaner do this? I've checked the winapp file for CCleaner but it doesn't give an indication of how it is doing it.

 

Why on earth have Mozilla amalgamated the bookmarks and history files into one? It's quite ridiculous and to me is a retrograde security step.

 

I've uninstalled FF3 and returned to FF2 for the time being but I can't stay with this version forever as eventually it may become a security risk in itself having an old browser rather than one with all the latest security patches.