1088276 - audit data cleared by "Clear Recent History"/forget button

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

The forget button clears a specific set of data types currently:
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/annotate/d8de0d7e52e0/browser/components/customizableui/CustomizableWidgets.jsm#l1008

These are a subset of all the items sanitize.js knows about:
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/annotate/d8de0d7e52e0/browser/base/content/sanitize.js#l133

Some of these were omitted because they don't support time-based clearing ("siteSettings" was ommitted per bug 1069300 comment 11, but has been improved since via bug 1058442).

Some data types sanitize.js currently doesn't handle properly (e.g. bug 527667).

I'd like the outcome of this bug to be a list of prioritized bugs for being able to say that "Forget" actually forgets as much as is feasible. This might mean new bugs covering data that sanitize.js currently doesn't handle at all, or modifications to allow more time-based clearing for other data types (e.g. bug 1058438).

Comment 1

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

One approach here may be to just look at the existing clear recent history buglist:
http://mzl.la/1zmHhTt

Another might be to do an actual audit of profile on-disk contents before/after using the feature, though that could get complicated.

Just brainstorming areas of code that persist data that aren't already covered by sanitize.js might be another approach as well.

Comment 2

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Over to dao, since we discussed it this morning.

Comment 3

[Marco Mucci [:MarcoM]]

Hi Dao, can you provide a point value

Comment 4

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

13 or 8, I think, but heavily leaning towards 13...

Comment 5

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

I'll call this fixed for this iteration, although stuff can be added to the meta bug I filed (bug 1102808) at any time. I prioritized the bugs currently tracked with the priority field:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?f1=blocked&list_id=11613463&columnlist=product%2Ccomponent%2Cassigned_to%2Cbug_status%2Cresolution%2Cshort_desc%2Cchangeddate%2Cpriority&o1=allwords&resolution=---&query_format=advanced&v1=1102808

You may need manually make sure the table is sorted by priority. Feel free to challenge the ranking.  As a rule of thumb, I prioritized data persisted by web sites (e.g. indexedDB) higher than manually stored data that web sites can't directly access (e.g. cookie exceptions), and the lowest priority went to more obscure transient data and caches that go away automatically after some certain time or after a restart.