For some reason IE9 does not store browser history. The problem has existed ever since I upgraded. Despite resetting the IE settings, the problem persists. I do not have "Delete browsing history on exit" checked and my "Days to keep pages in history" is set to 20.
All I get is something like this:
Best Answer
I've been experiencing this problem and solved it recently. The problem seems to be caused by the
index.dat
file growing beyond a 16MB limitation. Once it grows past that size, IE seems to no longer write additional information to it. Although the following article is talking about theindex.dat
file used for IE's caching mechanism, it seems highly plausible that it's what also causes the history problem.See here for more information
Removing the file has allowed my history to be to logged as normal. Below are the steps required to delete the file.
Firstly, you'll need to open up a command prompt with administrative rights. So, assuming Windows 7:
cmd
cmd.exe
. Right-click it and select Run as administrator.You need to run it as an administrator so you have the necessary permissions to delete the file. Steps to delete the file:
Use the following command to change to the directory with the index.dat file:
cd %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\History\Low\History.IE5
You'll need to close the browser in order to delete the file, so to get back here quickly, copy the URL to this question before closing the browser.
Run the following command:
del index.dat /a:s
del
is the command to delete a file. Appending/a:s
to the command tells it to select files to delete based on an attribue (s
in this case, which meanssystem file
).Note: The
\Low\History.IE5
directory will not be visible with thedir
command unless you usedir /a
. I'm mentioning this in case someone decides to look for it manually instead of copying the path from step 1.