1039460 - Add UI for clearing Visited Link/Browsing History when Thunderbird closes

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[u382332]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:30.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/30.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140605174243

Steps to reproduce:

Ref:
Bug 920118 - Make "visited link" coloring work in thunderbird (enable and use Places for history)
 
and...

Bug 1020339 - Add UI for disabling and clearing Visited Link/Browsing History 


Actual results:

Need to add UI to Clear Visited Link/Browsing History when Thunderbird closes.


Expected results:

This would eliminate the need to remember to manually clear Visited Link/Browsing History.

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

Respective code can be copied from Firefox, but it may e good to know which items eventually will be made available in the "Settings for Clearing History" dialog (or they need to be added as new items are included in the sanitize dialog).

That's browser/components/preferences/{privacy,sanitize}.* in mozilla-central.

As a workaround, you can set privacy.sanitize.sanitizeOnShutdown in the Config Editor.

Comment 2

[u382332]

(In reply to rsx11m from comment #1)
> As a workaround, you can set privacy.sanitize.sanitizeOnShutdown in the
> Config Editor.

That entry doesn't exist in Thunderbird without the sanitizeOnShutdown coding.

Comment 3

[rsx11m]

I didn't try it, but the code for performing this seems to be available:
http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mail/base/content/sanitize.js#267

The preference isn't defined by default and needs to be created, yes.

Comment 4

[u382332]

Without specifying which items to sanitize how would we know that anything gets cleared?

Comment 5

[u382332]

I tested it and places.sqlite-wal gets cleared completely from the profile and only re-generates itself again at 0KB when a message is opened and increases in size as links are clicked.

I don't know exactly what that file would contain.

Comment 6

[rsx11m]

(In reply to Bozz from comment #4)
> Without specifying which items to sanitize how would we know that anything gets cleared?

Ok, that's not all. For each item there are separate preferences privacy.clearOnShutdown.history, privacy.clearOnShutdown.cookies, privacy.clearOnShutdown.cache, etc., to determine whether or not a specific piece of history should be cleared on exit.

The items handled in the sanitize dialog invoked from the menu are the ones which are currently implemented. The same list of items would have to be considered in the dialog. Thus, two options:

1) Implement the dialog for the "Settings" button now with the three items (Browsing History, Cache, Cookies) that are available at this time, then - with each addition or modification - adjust both dialogs for sanitizing from the menu and for setting the sanitize-on-exit options to keep those two dialogs in sync; or,

2) First implement handling for all history items that should be clearable on demand, then design the respective sanitize-on-exit dialog based on that collection, thus potentially avoiding having to move boxes around as the design is updated.

Comment 7

[rsx11m]

(In reply to Bozz from comment #5)
> I tested it and places.sqlite-wal gets cleared completely from the profile

I /think/ that those are temporary files, places.sqlite is the one of interest.

Comment 8

[u382332]

Okay, then we actually would need to have a dialog and the respective prefs added.

Comment 9

[rsx11m]

Yes, that's in essence what Firefox does (general checkbox to enable clear on exit, then a "Settings" button enabled with checking that box which allows you to choose the history items to be cleared).

Comment 10

[u382332]

(In reply to rsx11m from comment #6)
> (In reply to Bozz from comment #4)
> > Without specifying which items to sanitize how would we know that anything gets cleared?
> 
> Ok, that's not all. For each item there are separate preferences
> privacy.clearOnShutdown.history, privacy.clearOnShutdown.cookies,
> privacy.clearOnShutdown.cache, etc., to determine whether or not a specific
> piece of history should be cleared on exit.
I added those prefs along with privacy.sanitize.sanitizeOnShutdown and history did not get cleared. Visited links retained their visited color state. I don't use cookies or cache so I couldn't check anything about those.

So, there's more to clearing on shutdown than simply added those prefs.

Comment 11

[rsx11m]

Hmm, too bad. Thus, the missing backend snippets will need to be identified and ported as well.