1417150 - Firefox 57 does not honor "Show your windows and tabs from last time" when "Clear History when Firefox closes" is set

Status: REOPENED

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect, P4)

Description

[spastorino]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
Build ID: 20171112125346

Steps to reproduce:

Go to about:preferences
In General Set "Show your windows and tabs from last time"
In Privacy & Security Set to Firefox will Use custom settings for history" & ...
Set "Clear History when Firefox closes"
Open one tab and navigate to mozilla.org
Close the browser & open it again


Actual results:

mozilla.org does not open


Expected results:

mozilla.org should have opened

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

This is really a contradiction in preferences - we shouldn't allow both to be set, or provide a warning. Marking as duplicate of bug 505548 as that seems like the closest fit.

Comment 2

[spastorino]

Is it really contradictory?. It was working fine on Firefox 56 and the way I was understanding it was ... remove the history, so after closing and opening again you won't see in my case mozilla.org anymore in the previously visited sites but I don't see why this should be related to my last session of tabs.

Comment 3

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

I think it depends on your view of history. Personally, my opinion would be that if I want to clear history, it might be so that others can't see - if the tabs re-open on startup with what I last viewed, then that's showing some of my history.

Given that you say this was working in 56 though, that seems a little strange, given the history of the bugs. So I'll re-open and move to Session Restore in case there's something going on here.

Comment 4

[spastorino]

Cool, notice that there's also a Remember my browsing and download history, which is kind of similar also to Clear history when Firefox closes. Actually now I'm not sure what each of those options means at all.

Comment 5

[Pete Moore [:pmoore][:pete]]

(In reply to spastorino from comment #4)
> Cool, notice that there's also a Remember my browsing and download history,
> which is kind of similar also to Clear history when Firefox closes. Actually
> now I'm not sure what each of those options means at all.

I found a pretty good overview at:

  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/settings-privacy-browsing-history-do-not-track

It looks like "Remember my browsing and download history" relates only to the list of urls you visited, and the list of files you downloaded. It does not include cookies, saved passwords, form data, active logins, etc.

In contrast "Clear history when Firefox closes" has a Settings box which contains seven check boxes for different types of user data which can potentially be cleared. In other words, it covers a more general set of data than "Remember my browsing and download history". However, and here is the sting, one of these seven subcategories is "Browsing & Download History" which matches exactly the same set of data as "Remember my browsing and download history".

In short, there are two different settings with exactly inverted behaviour: "Clear history when Firefox closes -> Browsing & Download History" checkbox and "Remember my browsing and download history" checkbox.

It is not clear what the behaviour should be if both are ticked or if both are unticked, since they would then contradict each other.

My proposal would be that "Remember by browsing and download history" should be removed entirely, in favour of "Clear history when Firefox closes -> Browsing & Download History". Alternatively, if both settings are kept, one should be auto-checked if the other is unchecked and vice versa - although that may be seen by some as a confusing user experience and overly complex (hence why I prefer just removing "Remember by browsing and download history").

Comment 6

[Pete Moore [:pmoore][:pete]]

(In reply to Pete Moore [:pmoore][:pete] from comment #5)
> My proposal would be that "Remember by browsing and download history" should
> be removed entirely, in favour of "Clear history when Firefox closes ->
> Browsing & Download History". Alternatively, if both settings are kept, one
> should be auto-checked if the other is unchecked and vice versa - although
> that may be seen by some as a confusing user experience and overly complex
> (hence why I prefer just removing "Remember by browsing and download
> history").

Note, this doesn't resolve the issue of whether tabs should or should not be restored on startup if 1) browsing and download history is not persisted and 2) "Show your windows and tabs from last time" is selected.

Perhaps a solution to that part is to "grey out" the "Show your windows and tabs from last time" option when the option to delete browsing and download history is chosen. Maybe even with a information icon (i) (or a hover-over text, etc) that explains why it has been greyed out (something like "You have chosen to clear browsing history when closing Firefox, which prevents tabs being restored when Firefox starts").

Comment 7

[spastorino]

As Pete said I would remove Remember my browsing and download history but my take on "Show your windows and tabs from last time" is different. What I would do is ... if you select "Clear history when Firefox closes" and do not select "Show your windows and tabs from last time", just remove everything and do not open tabs from last time. But if you select both "Clear history when Firefox closes" and "Show your windows and tabs from last time" I'd put a warning below both options saying, you have selected to keep your tabs from last time open which could be contradictory to "Clear history when Firefox closes", we will remove all your history data but tabs from last time will open, if this represents a problem to your privacy please change "Show your windows and tabs from last time" to something different. Something like that but shorter and well written :). And that is also more or less what happens in Firefox 56.

Comment 8

[Pete Moore [:pmoore][:pete]]

(In reply to spastorino from comment #7)
> As Pete said I would remove Remember my browsing and download history but my
> take on "Show your windows and tabs from last time" is different. What I
> would do is ... if you select "Clear history when Firefox closes" and do not
> select "Show your windows and tabs from last time", just remove everything
> and do not open tabs from last time. But if you select both "Clear history
> when Firefox closes" and "Show your windows and tabs from last time" I'd put
> a warning below both options saying, you have selected to keep your tabs
> from last time open which could be contradictory to "Clear history when
> Firefox closes", we will remove all your history data but tabs from last
> time will open, if this represents a problem to your privacy please change
> "Show your windows and tabs from last time" to something different.
> Something like that but shorter and well written :). And that is also more
> or less what happens in Firefox 56.

I agree this is a nicer solution. +++

Comment 9

[spastorino]

I've just figured that the issue is even worser to what I thought.

So ...

Steps to reproduce:

Go to about:preferences
In General Set "Show your windows and tabs from last time"
Open one tab and navigate to mozilla.org
Go to History -> Clear Recent History...
Click Clear now
Close the browser & open it again


Actual results:

mozilla.org does not open


Expected results:

mozilla.org should have opened

I think this is definitely wrong because after closing the browser I'm seeing my mozilla.org open and I think, given that I've selected "Show your windows and tabs from last time" that the tab should be recovered.

Comment 10

[spastorino]

Ok, my last comment was wrong. History -> Clear Recent History works as intended.

Anyway maybe that's the best way to explain that this is an issue.
"Clear history when Firefox closes" which has the very same options that "History -> Clear Recent History" has and which should be the same behaves differently since FF 57. "Clear history when Firefox closes" makes the browser forget the tabs from last time but going to "History -> Clear Recent History", clearing everything and closing the browser does not forget.

I definitely think that the behavior should be restored and maybe a warning could be a nice thing to have. But for sure the session shouldn't be lost.

Sorry for the back and forth.

Comment 11

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

If this is a regression introduced in 57 then we really need to figure out what caused this change in behavior.

spastorino, can you run mozregression[1] and find when this was regressed?

[1] http://mozilla.github.io/mozregression/

Comment 12

[spastorino]

Ok, will do but give me some time :). Because I'm very busy atm.

Comment 13

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bug_Triage/Projects/Bug_Handling/Bug_Husbandry#Move_fix-optionals