864047 - Combine -- and Delete -- Special Caches with General Cache

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[David E. Ross]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:20.0) Gecko/20100101 SeaMonkey/2.17.1

Besides a general cache on disc, there are several special caches, including startupCache, mozilla-media-cache, OfflineCache, and possibly others.  

1.  All such caches should be in the directory where the general cache is written.  If the user specifies a location for "Cache Folder Location" at [Preferences > Advanced > Cache], that directory should be used for all caches.  

2.  When the user selects the Clear Cache button at [Preferences > Advanced > Cache], all such caches should be deleted.  

3.  When the user sets the checkbox for Cache at [Preferences > Privacy & Security] under "When I ask SeaMonkey [or Firefox] to clear my private data, it should erase:" all such caches should be erased.  

This is a privacy issue.

Comment 1

[Josh Matthews [:jdm]]

Related to bug 848344.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

1. If this really is privacy (and sounds like is), should it not be considered a bug, rather than enh?
2. bug 804731 has much more info. Is this not an outright dupe of bug 804731?

Comment 3

[David E. Ross]

A major difference between this bug and bug #804731 is the privacy issue.  This bug specifies that any user request to delete "the cache" should delete all caches.  Bug #804731 does not address deleting caches.

Comment 4

[Honza Bambas (:mayhemer)]

(In reply to David E. Ross from comment #0)
> Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:20.0) Gecko/20100101 SeaMonkey/2.17.1
> 
> Besides a general cache on disc, there are several special caches, including
> startupCache, mozilla-media-cache, OfflineCache, and possibly others.  
> 
> 1.  All such caches should be in the directory where the general cache is
> written.  If the user specifies a location for "Cache Folder Location" at
> [Preferences > Advanced > Cache], that directory should be used for all
> caches.  

There is no such setting in Firefox.

> 
> 2.  When the user selects the Clear Cache button at [Preferences > Advanced
> > Cache], all such caches should be deleted.  

There is nothing like this in Forefox, we use /History/Clear recent history (Shift-Ctrl-Delete) where you can selectively delete data persisted by sites.

> 
> 3.  When the user sets the checkbox for Cache at [Preferences > Privacy &
> Security] under "When I ask SeaMonkey [or Firefox] to clear my private data,
> it should erase:" all such caches should be erased.  

Is this is a seamonkey bug?  As said above, we (Firefox) use a dialog to clear data where you can select what you want to delete when you are about to do the deletion.

> 
> This is a privacy issue.

I don't see it, sorry, or I'm not the right person to decide.

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #2)
> 1. If this really is privacy (and sounds like is), should it not be
> considered a bug, rather than enh?

I think this is a UI/UX problem, not a privacy issue.

> 2. bug 804731 has much more info. Is this not an outright dupe of bug 804731?

This is something totally different.

Comment 5

[David E. Ross]

When doing a system-wide backup, I am not interested in backing up caches.  While SeaMonkey deletes the general cache on termination (per my Private Data preference), the special caches are not deleted.  Thus, I manually delete the special caches before doing a backup.  

Yesterday, I did my weekly backup.  For three browser profiles, 3.64 MB of data were deleted from special caches.  I know that, with terabyte discs and SSDs, a megabyte does not seem like much.  However, that can accumulate significant fragmentation of such storage.  And it represents megabytes of data that might have privacy implications.

Comment 6

[David E. Ross]

During my latest backup process, I recovered more than 100 MB of disc by deleting special SeaMonkey caches that are not automatically deleted when SeaMonkey is terminated along with Thunderbird caches, which has no "privacy" option to delete caches.  This includes not only caches whose names end in "cache" but also those SeaMonkey caches whose names end in "Cache.Trashnnnn" (where "nnnn" is some number).