307383 - Set download history to clear either on successful download or exit by default

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, enhancement)

Description

[manc39]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050907 Firefox/1.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050907 Firefox/1.4

A reasonable amount of users on the support forum experience problems that turn
out to be caused by a large downloads history. 

I propose simply changing the default setting to either "Clear on successful
download" or "Clear when Firefox exits".

(Not sure about the severity here? It's technically an enhancement but is very
minor, if it's decided as a valid bug rather than won't fix or invalid.)

I'd say this is unaffected by the "Clear private data" function, as if people
don't use that feature then their downloads history would still build up.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Isaac]

Having downloads build up forever in the history is a pain.  Was causing everything to hang for 3-4 seconds every time I downloaded a file, as I had several hundred files in the history.  Clearing the history fixed it.  (OSX, so not just an issue with windows download manager)

Fixing it by changing the default to clear on close would be a start, but would be really great to add a pref for a limit to the numbers of downloads kept in history, and default that to 50 or so.  I'd prefer to be able to keep track of the history between browser restarts (so I can see if I previously downloaded something), but don't want to keep the history *forever* or have to manually manage it.

Comment 2

[Stephanie Daugherty [:sdaugherty]]

This is closely related to 132755, not sure if it's an exact dupe though. I'm confirming as a feature request and making it a dependency since it asks for different behavior than 132755 does.

Comment 3

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

The issues resulting from large download histories no longer exist.  I don't want to clear the download history by default.

Comment 4

[Stephen Donner [:stephend] Not actively reading bugmail]

Verified; I wouldn't want this cleared by default either.