1813898 - Firefox Android seems to create a "ghost entry" in your history for every domain bookmarked.

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Fenix :: Bookmarks, defect)

Description

[Jeff Boek [:boek]]

From github: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/28084.

Steps to reproduce

1. Bookmark a page.
2. Website will appear in your suggested URLs.
3. Remove the bookmark.
4. Website will remain in your suggested URLs, even if no browser history or bookmark of it exists.

Expected behaviour

Should no longer suggest the website if no history or bookmark of it exists.

Actual behaviour

When I bookmark on website on Android Firefox, that website is now suggested as a URL autofill, which seems normal. The only problem is that, even if I delete the bookmark it remains in my auto fill suggestions. This also continues even if I have no listings for it in my browser history (if I had deleted that website for my history, or if the bookmark was done in private browsing meaning there never was a history in the first place).

Firefox for Android has several settings to let you toggle what kinds of things are URL suggestions, and playing with them a little bit it looks like the only one that gets rid of this ghost entry is if I turn off "search browsing history" under "address bar." So:

• The only thing saved is the domain of the bookmark, not the full address. (ie. Bookmarking "http://www reddit.com/r/Firefox" will only leave a ghost entry for reddit's homepage)

• It appears this ghost entry is in the history somewhere.

• It doesn't show up in the normal history if you scroll down through it, but it does appear if you use the search bar in your history.

• The only way it looks like to get rid of it is to delete all of your browser history. Even using the option to delete everything from the last hour, or the last 2 days doesn't get rid of it.

tl;dr: The Android version of Firefox seems to save a record of every domain you've ever bookmarked, and the only way to clear this record is to delete your entire browsing history.

Device name

Google pixel 5

Android version

Android 13

Firefox release type

Firefox

Firefox version

107.2

Device logs

No response

Additional information

No response

┆Issue is synchronized with this Jira Task

Change performed by the Move to Bugzilla add-on.

Comment 2

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Copying over a relevant comment from the now-closed dupe: I think there's a dupe for this somewhere that I can't find, where IIRC, I wrote that I tracked this down to a record remaining in our moz_origins table.

IOW, this is an issue in app-services.

Comment 3

[jackyzy823]

Some related info
BUG: URL remains in places.sqlite after deleting from bookmark (corrupt moz_origins)
SUMO: URL can't be removed from address bar, site is not in history

Comment 4

[Kunal]

I'm currently facing the same issue. Over last 2 years I have removed, loads of bookmarks that were no longer working/relevant towards me but somehow FF Android keeps showing them despite them not being bookmarked or in my history/tabs/etc.

Would love to see this gets fixed as this gets annoying when you have large se of bookmarks.

Comment 5

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

I've verified that app-services (so our mobile browsers) has the same behaviour as desktop, as described in bug 1650511. I agree this should be improved.

Comment 6

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Fixed by https://github.com/mozilla/application-services/pull/5653, so will be coming to a nightly fairly soon.

Comment 7

[Iorga Gabriel]

I think this bug still isn't fixed. Please see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1848563

Comment 8

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

I believe the patch that landed in this bug did fix this bug as described, so let's leave this as "FIXED". Bug 1848563 is different.