204359 - clear saved form information doesn't empty formhistory.dat

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Jeremy M. Dolan]

In a profile with lots of form history saved, open prefs, and clear it.
Notice the button is greyed.
Quit Phoenix. Notice formhistory.dat grows by about 16K.
Restart Phoenix. Notice old form data not available in forms. Notice 'clear'
button still greyed.

It looks to me like Phoenix appended <datareference>=null on to the end of the
mdb file, instead of removing the old data.

This is a MAJOR privacy issue. Users will think their personal data has been
purged, as all UI indicates it has, while their data is actually still perfectly
readable in the mdb file.

Also probably a perf issue. I don't know if formhistory.dat will continue to be
appended to, or old entries will start to be overwritten.

Comment 1

[David P James]

Taking QA. Sorry for the bugspam

Comment 2

[David P James]

This doesn't seem to exist any more. formhistory.dat looks empty to me 
following a clear all. 

Comment 3

[Jeremy M. Dolan]

Just tried this again, with
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040727 Firefox/0.9.1+

Pretty much the same as first described. formhistory.dat grew from 52k to 59k.

Comment 4

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

could bug 254485 be related here?

Comment 5

[José Jeria]

(In reply to comment #4)
> could bug 254485 be related here?

or bug 253935...

Comment 6

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

(sairuh borrowing marcia's account)

could this be blocking bug 254485? nominating in case it does.

Comment 7

[chris hofmann]

bryner is looking

Comment 8

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

the patch in bug 254485 might fix this one.

Comment 9

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

looks fixed using 2004102109-0.9+ bits on linux fc2: formhistory.dat went from
27334 bytes to 245 bytes after I hit "clear," and remained as such after I had
quite firefox. marking verified.