Deleting browser history beyond the range of 1 day or so freezes Firefox or doesn't do anything
Categories
(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect, P3)
Tracking
()
People
(Reporter: hibbard.tyler, Unassigned)
Details
(Keywords: hang, regression, regressionwindow-wanted)
Attachments
(2 files)
Firefox History error.PNG
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:70.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/70.0
Steps to reproduce:
Every so often I will want to delete my browsing history, either altogether or for a certain period. To do this I click on the History top menu item and click "Show All History" which brings up the Library window with the History sidebar section selected.
I typically have the options of Today, 1 Day Ago, 1 Week ago, Last Month, then <previous month name> entries, each with several hundred or several thousand page entries listed.
I like to be able to delete these by any arbitrary selection I choose for various reasons.
Actual results:
For a while now (at least two versions of Firefox, I think... maybe more), I have not been able to select the ranges larger than 1 day (Today, 1 Day Ago, etc.) and delete those ranges via the "Delete" key. When I try this now, nothing happens, even after waiting many moments.
Even worse, when I click on one of the longer ranges (say, a range for all visits in October), and select the top item, then scroll a bit to shift+select a large swathe of page visit entries, and then click delete, the browser will freeze as a script is becoming unresponsive (see attached screenshots)
I suspect that at some point the script or process for deleting history was composited/combined with an existing process or thread that runs the main Firefox process (as the freeze/unresponsive script locks up my browser window and tabs as well), rather than operating on its own process or thread (thus allowing it to consume enough memory or CPU cycles on its own to complete its task)
Expected results:
The browser should proceed to delete the selected range of page history without failing, and also without slowing down or freezing either my normal Firefox browser window or the Library window.
This was reported couple of weeks ago. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1593477
Now closed and marked as duplicate of an 8 years old bug. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=734643
Although clearly this specific problem was introduced in version 70.0...
This is probably different from that; deletion of months of history or so worked perfectly fine until v69 or 70 or so.
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Comment 5•5 years ago
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Could you please try creating a new profile, then copying places.sqlite and favicons.sqlite files from your current profile to the new one, and see if the bug reproduces in that new profile? I'd like to exclude a few things related to the profile itself.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles
(In reply to Marco Bonardo [:mak] from comment #5)
Could you please try creating a new profile, then copying places.sqlite and favicons.sqlite files from your current profile to the new one, and see if the bug reproduces in that new profile? I'd like to exclude a few things related to the profile itself.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles
Created a new profile and selecting a month on the left and choosing Delete from context menu still does not do anything.
I can select all the history items for the specific month on the right and delete it that way as reported before. Still takes several minutes, but interestingly it does not produce unresponsive script warning under a new profile.
Thank you for looking into it.
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Updated•5 years ago
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Comment 7•5 years ago
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Hi,
we could not reproduce this issue, we tried Firefox 70, Release 72.0.2 and latest Nightly build. I reached hundreds of entries, and delete them by deleting entirely a month, or via scrolling and shift+selecting a large number of page visit entries, without success to reproduce the bug.
Can you provide any other step that could be helpful? Maybe I'm missing some important detail, i.e a larger number of entries (maybe more than a thousand).
Regards!
Jerónimo.
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Comment 8•5 years ago
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It's likely a lot more than a thousand, but hard to tell from the report. It's hard to see where this bug ends and bug 734643 starts.
I think this bug was just about picking a month from the history sidebar and from the contextual menu picking Delete. Also as it was reported the situation must have gone worse in 71 or such. That's what we should try to find, whether there is a clear difference between let's say 69 and 72, and find the regrange for that worsening.
P3 until we can find more details about when this started getting worse.
Hi; for what it's worth, I have not encountered this issue since upgrading to 72 stable, but I don't have enough information myself to know whether the issue is truly resolved. It may just be I've not accrued enough history.
Yes, the amount was much more than a thousand (though I didn't perform rigorous tests to see around what threshold the issue occurred), and the deletion lag occurred whether I selected a time range from the history sidebar (not just a month but also 'last 7 days' sometimes) and pressed the Delete key or selected delete from the contextual menu.
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Comment 10•5 years ago
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I’ve tried to reproduce this issue on Nightly from 2019-11-18, and on 70.0 RC using Windows 10x64.
On Nightly I can delete all history but on 70.0 RC I can’t delete the “Last month” folder, when I choose the “delete” option nothing happens.
On 74.0, latest beta 75.0b11 and 76.0a1 (2020-03-30) I can not reproduce this issue and based on comment 9 marking this as resolved worksforme.
Tyler, if you can still reproduce it please feel free to reopen it.
Description
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