PRTime

PRTime is the time and date format used by Mozilla in its software. This date and time format is used extensively within Firefox 3 and it is used in a number of places within the SQLite databases that Firefox 3 uses to record various items including its browsing history and bookmarks.

An example PRTime is: 1221842272303080
Which decodes to: 16:37:52 19/09/2008 UTC

PRTime Format

PRTime is very similar to Unix or POSIX time. As the table below shows:

Name	Format	Epoch	Increments
PRTime	64-bit integer	Midnight 1 January 1970 UTC	Microseconds
Unix / POSIX	32-bit integer	Midnight 1 January 1970 UTC	Seconds

As a microsecond is one millionth of a second you can easily convert PRTime to UNIX time by dividing the PRTime value by 1,000,000.

In the example above of PRTime 1221842272303080, if we divide this by 1,000,000 we get 1221842272.30308. Now if we drop the fractional part we have the UNIX timestamp of 1221842272 which, as above, converts to Friday, September 19th 2008, 16:37:52 (UTC).

PRTime is used by the following columns in Firefox 3

Database	Column	Table
cookies.sqlite	moz_cookies	lastAccessed
downloads.sqlite	moz_downloads	startTime
downloads.sqlite	moz_downloads	endTime
places.sqlite	moz_annos	dateAdded
places.sqlite	moz_annos	lastModified
places.sqlite	moz_bookmarks	dateAdded
places.sqlite	moz_bookmarks	lastModified
places.sqlite	moz_favicons	expiration
places.sqlite	moz_historyvisits	visit_date
places.sqlite	moz_items_annos	dateAdded
places.sqlite	moz_items_annos	lastModified

Resources

• f3e - A tool which has a PRTime decoder function
• PRTime Documentation
• Online UNIX Time Stamp Converted
• Wikipedia - Unix Time