370644 - should clearing private data (and history) clear the visit count?

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

should clearing private data (and history) clear the visit count?

it appears that clearing history removes the actual visits from the visit table, the visit_count in the moz_places table is not cleared.  

for privacy reasons, I think we should clear that, but that will have side effects (but perhaps desirable ones), such as sort by most visited in the history sidebar will be reset.

(found while testing bug #367386)

places / browser folks: comments?

Comment 1

[Brett Wilson]

This only really affects URLs which will stay in the database when they have no visits, which are bookmarks. It has the same source as bug 327819.

Comment 2

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

Actually, if an entry has EXPIRE_NEVER annotations, the moz_places record will *not* get deleted, even if there are no entries for it in moz_historyvisits.

Comment 3

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

note, there is a bug about making unvisited bookmarks show up as results for url bar autocomplete.

keeping the visit could be a useful thing, for determining "rank" between bookmarks.

Comment 4

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

> keeping the visit could be a useful thing, for determining "rank" between bookmarks.

Indeed it is.

Because of the approach in bug #394038, this becomes wontfix.

I'm purposefully *not* clearing visit_count because I'd actually like to use the old and out of date visit count for:

1)  breaking ties between places where frecencies are equal (which is likely to happen when frecency gets reset to -1 on migration or after clear all private data.

2)  for determining which places to recalculate first, on idle, 

note, on frecency recalculation, we will properly recalculate visit count.

details in bug #394038 and http://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Sspitzer/GlobalFrecency

I'm arguing that this bug should be wontfix, but as side effect is places where we use visit_count (in the most visited places smart query and in the places organizer) may not always be correct.  I'll log a spin of bug about that.

Comment 5

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

marking wontfix, based on my comments.

Comment 6

[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