320505 - Not able to 'clear private data' if history is off (= "remember history for 0 days")

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Verneri]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

I tried to (several times) 'clear private data'. After doing that I could still go  forward (ALT+right arrow) and backward (ALT+left arrow) which means cache really wasn't cleared. I could still surf on pages I had visited. The problem was fixed, when I turned history on (=remember history for 1 days). I tried to 'clear private data' again and the arrows in the navigation bar turned grey immediately. So the problem, I guess, is that you can't clear all private data when you have history off ('remember history for 0 days').

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Turn history off (0 days)
2.'Clear private data' 


Actual Results:  
Data is not cleared. See 'Details' above.

Expected Results:  
I should not have been able to go to the previous page I'd visited. It should've cleared the data.

Please feel free to ask for additional information if the description of the problem was not detailed enough. I wasn't able to find an earlier report on this bug even though I tried.

Comment 1

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Clearing confidential flag. Can't be hacked remotely due to this, so better to let more people know so they can use the workaround.

Back/forward is session history, the days of history saved on disk is global history. Neither are the actual cached pages (though 'Clear private data' clears cache by default, too).

Looks to me like if there's no (global) history saved then it skips clearing history entirely and forgets to do session history separately..

Comment 2

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Look like sanitize.js's canClear for history just checks whether global history items exist, even though it does clear session history for all tabs by firing a "browser:purge-session-history" event that is observed by <browser>s. Enumerating over all open browsers to determine whether there is also session history to clear would is kind of bothersome... maybe canClear for history should just always return true?

Comment 3

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Enumerating over all open browsers to determine whether there is also session
> history to clear would is kind of bothersome... maybe canClear for history
> should just always return true?

Bug 347231 made it always return true, so this bug is fixed by that one.