333199 - Delete old history.dat, formhistory.dat, and bookmarks.html at some point

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 329741

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect, P3)

Description

[Brett Wilson]

For people that upgrade from 1.x to 2.0, they will have their old bookmarks.html, history.dat, and formhistory.dat.

This could pose a privacy problem. People would clear their history or delete a bookmark and assume that it's gone, when it would still be there in the backup file.

We should delete at least history.dat and formhistory.dat when they press "clear history." We might also want an automatic method, for example, when we know all of their old history has expired because enough time has passed since they migrated to 2.0.

We should be careful for people who use multiple versions of the browser with the same profile. If the files are in use (perhaps because they've been changed since we upgraded) then we shouldn't do any automatic deleting.

Comment 1

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

bug 329741?

Comment 2

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

I would argue that handling the case of multiple firefox versions in the same profile is not necessary. It's certainly not been done in the past, and I would expect most of those doing it to be competent enough to handle using different profiles.

Comment 3

[Brett Wilson]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 329741 ***

Comment 4

[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