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Mozilla firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a Free and Open Source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation.

It can have many add-ons which give it extra capabilities.

Anonymous Browsing

Mozilla Firefox can be used in anonymous browsing (see The Onion Router. However, it is known that Firefox reveals computer's uptime in TLS (SSL) "Client Hello" packets allowing investigator correlate anonymous and non-anonymous traffic 1.

This bug affects Firefox 2 (all versions) and Firefox 3 Beta3.

History

Firefox 3 stores the history of visited sites in a file named places.sqlite. This file uses the SQLite database format.

places.sqlite can be found in the following locations:

On Linux

/home/$USER/.mozilla/firefox/$PROFILE.default/places.sqlite

On MacOS-X

/Users/$USER/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/$PROFILE.default/places.sqlite

On Windows XP

C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\%PROFILE%.default\places.sqlite

On Windows Vista, 7

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\%PROFILE%.default\places.sqlite

Timestamps

The places.sqlite uses the following timestamps.

The moz_historyvisits.visit_date is in (the number of) microseconds since January 1, 1970 UTC

Some Python code to do the conversion into human readable format:

date_string = datetime.datetime( 1970, 1, 1 )
            + datetime.timedelta( microseconds=timestamp )

Example queries

Some example queries:

To get an overview of the visited sites:

SELECT datetime(moz_historyvisits.visit_date/1000000, 'unixepoch', 'localtime'), moz_places.url FROM moz_places, moz_historyvisits WHERE moz_places.id = moz_historyvisits.place_id;

Downloads

Firefox 3 stores the history of downloads sites in a file named downloads.sqlite. This file uses the SQLite database format.

downloads.sqlite can be found in the same location as places.sqlite.

Note it looks that Firefox 21 (or earlier?) stores the downloads as part of the bookmarks in moz_bookmarks and moz_annos in places.sqlite

Timestamps

The places.sqlite uses the following timestamps.

The moz_downloads.startTime and moz_downloads.endTime are in (the number of) microseconds since January 1, 1970 UTC.

Example queries

Some example queries:

To get an overview of the downloaded files:

SELECT moz_downloads.startTime, moz_downloads.source, moz_downloads.currBytes, moz_downloads.maxBytes FROM moz_downloads;

Disk Cache

The Mozilla Firefox disk cache uses the Firefox Disk Cache Format and can be found in:

Version 1

On Linux

/home/$USER/.mozilla/firefox/$PROFILE.default/Cache/

On MacOS-X

/Users/$USER/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles/$PROFILE.default/Cache/

On Windows XP

C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\%PROFILE%.default\Cache\

On Windows Vista, 7

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\%PROFILE%.default\Cache\

Version 2 - Firefox 32 and later

On Linux

/home/$USER/.mozilla/firefox/$PROFILE.default/cache2/

On MacOS-X

/Users/$USER/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles/$PROFILE.default/cache2/

On Windows XP

C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\%PROFILE%.default\cache2\

On Windows Vista, 7

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\%PROFILE%.default\cache2\

Settings

URL:

about:config

See Also