888744 - "Clear private data at shutdown" disables disk cache without warning

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[fbcynfrr]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:22.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130618035212

Steps to reproduce:

I chose the "Clear private data at shutdown" option.


Actual results:

This disabled the disk cache without warning.


Expected results:

I should at least have received a warning.

Elaboration: I understand the decision to disable the disk cache and still strongly disagree with it. I also realize this isn't the place for trying to open a debate on the matter and will not do so. However, I only found out about all of this today, after hours of wondering what was going wrong with my cache, tinkering with my set-up, and asking for help. While a second's thought is enough to realize that "clear private data at shutdown" will result in a longer shutdown, there is absolutely no way to realize that this option will disable the disk cache. If you want to impose this decision on me, fine (no, not really), but at least inform me of it. For example, in the "When I quit Firefox, it should automatically clear all" dialogue, either "Cache" could be replaced by "Cache (This disables the cache)" or checking the cache box should bring up a "Warning: choosing this option disables the cache" pop-up. Sure, this is slightly ugly, but hey, I'm not the one who chose the initiating behavior.

(And just like I am not trying to use this post to revert this behavior, I hope it is clear that arguing that this is a good policy does not negate the fact that it is not intuitive and can be confusing to users.)