1641956 - There is no easy way to clear the browser of your saved logins and bookmarks

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1208194

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement)

Description

[J. Bumblebee Extraordinaire]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:76.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/76.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Go to Firefox Option/Preferences (about:preferences)

Actual results:

Sadly, nothing, and that's the point.

Please give us a way to completely wipe away all our personal data from Firefox.
In Settings/Preferences, there is a way to clear/clean cookies/history, but there's no way to easily remove our:
--saved logins
--bookmarks
--etc

Expected results:

In Firefox Options (about:preferences), there should be a way to easily remove our saved logins and bookmarks from the local browser without having to navigate to the profiles folder and manually deleting some files (e.g. a logins.json and a .db file).

My logins (username/email addresses & Passwords) are still available, even after I cleared "Everything" history; signed out of my Fox sync account; cleared "Cookies and Site Data".

So for example, after doing the above, I'm now logged out of my gmail account, but if someone steps in front of the computer I was using, runs Firefox, and goes to Gmail.com, they can see all the gmail accounts I have and can log in to them.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.

Comment 2

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

Bug 1208194 will address saved logins. I believe we used to have the option in the uninstaller to delete the data. Are you planning to uninstall Firefox?

Another option is to create a new profile on about:profiles, switch to it, then delete the old profile.

To delete all bookmarks you can probably use Ctrl+A to select all in the bookmark management window.

Once both management pages have multi-selection then I don't think there is more we will do about this. We have documentation on how to delete this: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/uninstall-firefox-from-your-computer#w_remove-user-data-and-settings

Comment 3

[J. Bumblebee Extraordinaire]

Hi Matthew,

Thanks for your reply.

No, I'm not planning on uninstalling Firefox. I use public computers and when I'm done using Firefox for the session/day, I'd like a user-friendly way to wipe the public computer clean of all my data. Because I'm using public computers, I don't think I have admin access to uninstalling Firefox anyway.

Comment 4

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

Ok, thanks for the info… we wouldn't recommend saving logins or syncing saved logins onto a public computer as there could be malware on it. Some public computers have Deep Freeze software that causes the data to get wiped upon restart. If the public computer you use do that then I would recommend doing that instead. You can test it out by restarting the computer and seeing if your data is still on the computer.

If you have no other option but to save sensitive data on public computers you can still follow the instructions on our support site. Did you give them a try? As a non-admin you normally should still have access to delete the Firefox profile folder.

Comment 5

[J. Bumblebee Extraordinaire]

Thanks for your reply, Matt.

Fortunately, I was able to go to %appdata and remove the /roaming/Mozilla/ folder. Doing that removed all saved logins, bookmarks, history, etc.

But why not have a userfriendly way of wiping all of these personal things from within the browser, something similar to what Google Chrome has? When I disconnect my Google Account from Google Chrome, I can put a checkmark in a box which then wipes clean my passwords, bookmarks, etc. No need to fiddle with some hidden folder. I'd love to know the Mozilla dev team's thoughts on this.

Comment 6

[J. Bumblebee Extraordinaire]

I meant %appdata%