1493795 - Add a maintenance task to cleanup orphan origins left over by third party apps

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1650511

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[ahmedhamdy]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:62.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/62.0
Build ID: 20180920131237

Steps to reproduce:

Firefox keep storing some visited websites even after i cleared everything through CTRL-SHIFT-DELETE .

1- open any website such as  mawaly.com
2- clean all history through CTRL-SHIFT-DELETE.
3- open firefox and start to type ma in the search bar then you will found that the full website auto-filled even after you cleared the complete history.


Actual results:

Firefox storing some visited websites which is completely cleared from the history. and keep present them in the search bar.


Expected results:

the visited websites should not appear in search bar after clearing the full history.

Comment 1

[MoodyMoon]

I just want to add that deleting the user profile plus data using firefox.exe -P or any third-party cleaners such as CCleaner do not work as well.

I am using Firefox 62.0.2 x64 on Windows 7 SP1.

Comment 2

[MoodyMoon]

(In reply to MoodyMoon from comment #1)
> I just want to add that deleting the user profile plus data using
> firefox.exe -P or any third-party cleaners such as CCleaner do not work as
> well.
> 
> I am using Firefox 62.0.2 x64 on Windows 7 SP1.

I made a mistake saying deleting the user profile doesn't clear the history.

It does clear the history from the search bar but bug can still be reproduced after that.

Third-party cleaners such as CCleaner does not clear the history.

I was thinking Firefox messed up some profile data after an update, but obviously not after testing it using a new profile.

My setup has one profile only.

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

Could you please add a screenshot showing some of those non-cleared entries after a full clear history?

Comment 4

[MoodyMoon]

Attachment: Firefox provided a search suggestion with history supposedly cleared

I have search suggestion and internet turned off when I took the screenshot.

Comment 5

[ahmedhamdy]

That's the issue what I'm talking about. the screenshot uploaded by @MoodyMoon is explaining the issue as well. no need for uploading another screenshot.

Comment 6

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

do you have a bookmark pointing to old.reddit.com?

Comment 7

[MoodyMoon]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [::mak] from comment #6)
> do you have a bookmark pointing to old.reddit.com?

No. It might sound weird but I do not use bookmarks at all on all browsers on my computer.

Maybe you can try to reproduce the bug on your browser. It is really easy to reproduce unless you did and can't, which in that case might classify this bug as an isolated case.

Try to reproduce the bug on a Firefox installation on Windows.

Comment 8

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

I cannot reproduce your problem, even on Windows, and that's why I'm trying to gather more information from you, to understand where that comes from.

Could you please open the Bookmarks sidebar and search for old.reddit.com? Just to be sure.
Note that using things like CCleaner (or any external tool) to cleanup Firefox private data, is the best way to break data coherency and cause these bugs. Those software have no idea of the internal data dependencies and end up leaving a bunch of unclean orphans behind. They sell the feature as privacy-safe, but in reality using Firefox internal methods is much safer.
If this is what happened, we may have to add a special maintenance task to cleanup orphans in the next version.

If the bookmarks sidebar returns nothing, I will prepare a couple queries for you to run in Scratchpad to find that data. so please let me know.

Comment 9

[MoodyMoon]

I did a more thorough investigation and found that the culprit is indeed CCleaner.

Basically this bug manifests itself only after CCleaner is used, in particular when the "Internet History" option is selected in the Firefox section.

The annoying thing about the bug is that it persists even after clearing the cache using Firefox built-in cleaner if CCleaner is used before that. In other words, this will not happen if CCleaner is never used. I think it corrupts the profile just as you have suspected.

Just for reference, the version of CCleaner I use at the time of writing this is 5.47.6716.

The way to fix the problem is to delete the corrupted profile.

Thanks for the help, Marco.

Comment 10

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

(In reply to MoodyMoon from comment #9)
> I think it
> corrupts the profile just as you have suspected.

Right, please report the bug to them, so they can eventually fix it.

> The way to fix the problem is to delete the corrupted profile.

Actually, you could even just delete places.sqlite, Firefox should generate a new clean one using the latest bookmarks backup. Since you don't care about history that should be fine.

I'll transform this bug to add a maintenance task cleaning up orphan origins.

Comment 11

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

We should add a new maintenance query to PlacesDBUtils to remove any origins that don't have references in moz_places.

Comment 12

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

we'll do this in bug 1650511.