332028 - History URL domain blacklisting

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement)

Description

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

My history list "By last visited" is overloaded with Gmail and my homepage. I see tens and sometimes hundreds of them per day. Sites that I will never revisit again by means of history; I go simply to my inbox to view my mail and I'll never re-read most of them. It is also terribly privacy sensitive to see all your mails displayed in places or in your sidebar. Everyone who looks two seconds over your shoulder or use your browser for a few moments can see your correspondence.
A way to prevent that they overcrowd my history list and make places load slowly would be welcome and I think blacklisting of domains would be a good possibility.

Comment 1

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

And all my google searches :( 

Comment 2

[Brett Wilson]

Just to check, if you stay on Gmail and look at different messages, browse around, etc. you shouldn't get multiple history entries. If you go back to Gmail, you'll get a new one.

Comment 3

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

I see hundreds of Gmail links, but now I see they are all the same.
Everytime when I read a mail, all the titles change instantly into the last one I read. All links lead to my inbox when I'm logged in.

Comment 4

[Brett Wilson]

(In reply to comment #3)
> I see hundreds of Gmail links, but now I see they are all the same.
> Everytime when I read a mail, all the titles change instantly into the last one
> I read. All links lead to my inbox when I'm logged in.

I migrated my main profile to FF2 and I see the same problem. I think the issue is that the redirect pages' URLs were in history were unhidden before the import, and we keep adding more visits for these unhidden URLs. I filed bug 332120 for this.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I'm not sure this is something we want, an history domain blacklisting thing. Actually we allow to clear visits/pages by domain, that's just one click. An extension could do that automatically listening to history service additions.
Also, doubt we can fix perf issue blacklisting popular domains.

Comment 6

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

Well, this will help to reduce the amount of history and keep the places.sqlite smaller. It is also a way to increase the amount of useless matches in the locationbar autocomplete.
 
At the moment I use Private Browsing and Clear Recent History to wipe out extensive searches but it is not ideal for this goal.

Comment 7

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Actually we allow to clear visits/pages by domain, that's just one click.

This bug was filed in a time when it was impossible or very difficult to delete large amounts of history. It hung my browser for minutes, and switching between "By site" and "By last visited" took also some patience. 

I still think however that it would be nice if the browser automatically never remembers e.g. GMail sites and Bugzilla entries.

Comment 8

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Bug 451915 - move Firefox/Places bugs to Firefox/Bookmarks and History. Remove all bugspam from this move by filtering for the string "places-to-b-and-h".

In Thunderbird 3.0b, you do that as follows:
Tools | Message Filters
Make sure the correct account is selected. Click "New"
Conditions: Body   contains   places-to-b-and-h
Change the action to "Delete Message".
Select "Manually Run" from the dropdown at the top.
Click OK.

Select the filter in the list, make sure "Inbox" is selected at the bottom, and click "Run Now". This should delete all the bugspam. You can then delete the filter.

Gerv

Comment 9

[Filip Zakrzewski]

Any progress?
This is must have if Firefox has to be innovative.

There should be option to disable history saving for particular domains (like Google, Gmail, Facebook)

I hate to have thousands of millions useless history lines i never ever visit again.

Comment 10

[Alex Keybl [:akeybl]]

Not a regression - no need to track.

Comment 11

[BMO Automation]

Per policy at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bug_Triage/Projects/Bug_Handling/Bug_Husbandry#Inactive_Bugs. If this bug is not an enhancement request or a bug not present in a supported release of Firefox, then it may be reopened.