Creepy Firefox Storage [SOLVED]

[midnightblack]

At this terminal, I'm running a fairly recently installed Debian 9 OS. I'm not exactly a Linux wizard, but I know my way around if given proper instructions with help from the Internet.

I wanted to find a subroutine written a while ago, having a fairly common word as a name, and as I couldn't remember the name of the file that contained it, I went for a lazy drive-wide search for that string. While I always expect weird things to happen, a 'The Matrix'-level wall of text containing a four letter word starting with 'p' (yeah, I know <.< ) was somewhat surprising. Even more so as I've never actually accessed some of the particular webpages containing that word and that were still showing up.

I was careful to set the privacy/history/cookies options accordingly for firefox when I first started it up, but it appears that the bastards still store locally a huge amount of data regarding my on-line activity but it appears there's some kind of huge data base containing all sorts of websites, including a ton of adult stuff that there's no way I ever had anything to do with. It just seems very odd. I believed at first that the culprit was ./cache, but it appears that the stuff is actually contained in ./firefox, in something called browser extension data and storage.js (though I'm not 100% on this).

I'm totally fine with storing dirty things on my personal computer, as long as I know about them and I do it consciously. My question would be if there is away to clear that particular data. At the end of the day, if I run a drive-wide search for the 'p'-word, I'd like it if it only found the stuff that I've put there myself.

Thank you!

Later Edited for further clarifications regarding the wall of text including dirty words.

[midnightblack]

Alright, I think I actually figured it out. First I ran a system-wide scan to be sure I didn't have some weird malware, and then I actually checked for filthy content on another machine running the same OS, but without Adblock installed. And yes, searching for files containing common strings on that machine did not result in a wall of dubious websites.

So, apparently having Adblock installed implies that somewhere in the bowels of your hard drive you will have a blacklist with pretty much every dubious website out there. I assume it remains true for Windows, as well as other Linux distros. Good to know, but still rather creepy.

[Oniya]

Adblock may have a pre-populated blacklist of common adservers that people really don't want showing up at random.

[Vekseid]

Use ublock origin, not adblock.

Also, it's possible some of the links were prefetched:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections

[midnightblack]

Thank you, Veks. Will try ublock when I'm back at that terminal.

I guess I understand what Oni is saying, but eh, I consider myself much too decent a person to have all that p-stuff defiling my hard drive, even if it's just a list that helps block inappropriate content. I wish there was some other way to go about it.

[Oreo]

Use ublock origin, not adblock.

Also, it's possible some of the links were prefetched:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections

Oooooo, that is MUCH better! *hugs*

[Cycle]

Use ublock origin, not adblock.

Also, it's possible some of the links were prefetched:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections

Veks, would you suggest using only ublock as the ad blocker add on for FireFox?

[midnightblack]

What do you know, removing adblock has also discarded the p-word list. Ublock works just fine and hasn't created any embarrassing entries on my hard drive, at least for now.

In my book, Veks is definitely up there with Prometheus. Thank you!  ::)