Firefox lacks a safe way to clear older history
Categories
(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)
Tracking
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People
(Reporter: erwinm, Unassigned)
Details
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:86.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/86.0
Steps to reproduce:
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There are discoverable ways to clear recent history, but they do not cover older history.
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Going into about:preferences, and searching "history," nothing relevant shows up. Page Down doesn't work there, and since the Quantum redesigm, scrolling can trigger migraines.
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I find this thread, and follow the instructions.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/922755
Actual results:
Firefox freezes up, my whole computer freezes, and then my computer crashes and restarts.
Expected results:
I suspect it was too much at one time. I don't know what to do to avoid this.
Using Firefox 86 w/ accessibility fixes on MacOS 10.14.6 on Mac Mini.
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Updated•2 years ago
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P.S. Afterwards, sites which I've often visited in the past week disappear from history, as well as ones which I'd only visited once a year ago. Which is not what I'd expect.
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Comment 2•2 years ago
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Hey Marja,
I tried reproducing this issue on the latest versions of Firefox Nightly 88.0a1 (2021-03-22), beta 87.0 and release 86.0.1 but the clear history option seems to work just fine.
Can you test the issue while in Safe Mode? You can find helpful info here : https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-using-safe-mode .
Also a fresh new profile could help. You can find more about creating a new profile here : https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-and-diagnose-firefox-problems#w_6-create-a-new-firefox-profile .
If possible, you can test this issue on the nightly build as well. Download the build from : https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/nightly/all/ .
Although Firefox crashed my computer, it did clear everything more than 6 months old, so I can't clear that all over again to compare the results.
So-called quote "safe" unquote mode disables some safety and accessibility fixes. A fresh new profile lacks all these fixes and reverts to Firefox's default settings, e.g. enabling autoplaying animations, enabling smooth scrolling, etc. so it is a migraine trigger and a seizure risk. A new nightly build can't sync all safety and accessibility fixes either, so not an option.
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Comment 4•2 years ago
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Hi, we are aware of this problem, selecting a lot of visits and removing them all at once is extremely slow due to the view trying to update itself too often. Usually if you let it run for hours, it completes, but it's totally not great.
There are architectural reasons for that, that require a lot of time to be solved. We are working on some of the requirements now, but we can't improve the performance until that work is complete.
Long term we would like to completely replace these views with more performant ones.
In the meanwhile, rather than removing entries this way you can:
- use an add-on to keep history clean, there are many on addons.mozilla.org, many years ago I made one named Expire History By Days for example
- search history, right click and Forget about full domains. Though note that removes all the info (cookies, permissions...) about those domains, so don't do it for things you normally use.
- remove visits in small chunks
For performance reasons you usually don't need to remove history, if you want to do it for privacy reasons, I'd suggest to use add-ons at this time.
(In reply to Marco Bonardo [:mak] from comment #4)
In the meanwhile, rather than removing entries this way you can:
- use an add-on to keep history clean, there are many on addons.mozilla.org, many years ago I made one named Expire History By Days for example
- search history, right click and Forget about full domains. Though note that removes all the info (cookies, permissions...) about those domains, so don't do it for things you normally use.
- remove visits in small chunks
This list misses another way that was mentioned in one of the related bugs, one that requires the least amount of hassle and works reliably for me:
- Hit Up or Down arrow right after pressing Delete on a large number of selected History entries.
AFAIU the UI locks up because the browser recalculates selection in an extremely inefficient manner while deleting entries, and this hacky workaround prevents this from happening by resetting the selection. You can actually delete thousands of entries this way, it's not instant but at least the browser UI doesn't freeze during that period.
Description
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