1607383 - Clearing recent history deletes session store

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Data Sanitization, defect, P5)

Description

[seeker001]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36 Edge/18.18362

Steps to reproduce:

clearing recent history deletes all session store information. new session store is not generated. unclean shutdown results in lost tabs

Actual results:

unable to restore previous session. no session files are available

Expected results:

regenerate session store based on open tabs at time of history clean or sanitize only recent entries from session store. unless the option is chosen to delete all history, not sure why clearing only recent history deletes ALL open tabs. An option should be explicitly available if recent history includes delete information on all opened tabs beyond the timeframe indicated to be cleared.

Comment 1

[Johann Hofmann [:johannh]]

I don't understand. Clearing history shouldn't close open windows/tabs/sessions by default AFAIK, can you describe in more detail how you're clearing history and what happens then, maybe with a screen recording if possible?

Thanks!

Comment 2

[seeker001]

the issue is clearing recent history deletes saved sessions. The current session is not saved until a clean exit. If an unexpected shutdown occurs, the entire session is lost

steps to reproduce:

1. open 5 tabs (any amount of tabs really)
2. clear recent history
3. unplug power or kill virtual machine so a clean exit is not achieved
4. start machine again
5. start firefox
6. previous session is lost in a vacuum never to be seen again

Comment 3

[Johann Hofmann [:johannh]]

Ok, I see, thank you for clarifying! This is a bit tricky to avoid while still keeping the same privacy guarantees. I'm not sure if there's really something we'd want to do about the "unplug power" case here, but I agree that we could potentially try to make session store clearing more granular.

Comment 5

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

This is probably related to bug 1497731. How much browsing does it take to trigger a new save point once we've deleted everything?