416576 - History shouldn't be remembered 'at least', but 'up to'

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[Ivan Ičin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b4pre) Gecko/2008020708 Minefield/3.0b4pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b4pre) Gecko/2008020708 Minefield/3.0b4pre

Currently options allows you to chose Firefox to remember how many days Firefox will 'at least' remember pages you visited. If it is Privacy setting, then it should be 'up to', or exactly, otherwise you get no privacy protection.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Well, the full text (with the default parameters) is actually "at least 90 days, up to 180 days, with a maximum of 40000 entries". Only the first figure is visible in the UI at the moment. So you only want the second one ?

Comment 2

[Ivan Ičin]

I think I was precise in description that current option doesn't make sense in Privacy settings.

With your more detailed explanation, I guess that second one fits the best, though one can argue that third one may also fit.

Comment 3

[Jo Hermans]

Changing to NEW state, to make it visible for the module developers (this isn't a promise that they'll do it though).

Comment 4

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

See bug 402880, where the current UI was chosen.

Comment 5

[Ivan Ičin]

I might be wrong, but I think that current setting doesn't protect Privacy in any way, which makes it a fundamental mistake. So I am asking for Firefox 3 blocking.

Comment 6

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

I'm not sure how specifying an upper-bound is really privacy protection, here, as it relies on the idea that a user is concerned about potential privacy violations at some predictable point in the relative future (ie: "I know that someone might go poking around in 5 days from now, so I can choose to remember my history for that long.") Those interested in protecting their privacy should either be clearing their history on shutdown (using Clear Private Data) or not having the browser store their history in the first place.

I do take your point that the preference is currently more about performance than privacy, but I always believed that the privacy portion of the preference was choosing to remember history or not, and the latter was always about keeping tabs on the size of the history.rdf file.

This doesn't block as-is, but cc'ing Jesse, Johnath and Dveditz for further comment. They should renom if I'm being shortsighted.

Comment 7

[Ivan Ičin]

(In reply to comment #6)
> I'm not sure how specifying an upper-bound is really privacy protection, here,
> as it relies on the idea that a user is concerned about potential privacy
> violations at some predictable point in the relative future (ie: "I know that
> someone might go poking around in 5 days from now, so I can choose to remember
> my history for that long.") Those interested in protecting their privacy should
> either be clearing their history on shutdown (using Clear Private Data) or not
> having the browser store their history in the first place.

I partially agree, at least that I had the same thing in mind.

My primary objection is that one was able to set history to zero and prevent Firefox from remembering anything anytime, and I am not aware that it is possible now through Options dialog.

Other than that, I think that 'up to' dialog makes some sense if you deal with sensitive data all the time, but still want to keep history (e.g. because you have a lot non-sensitive data, too). Thus you avoid risk that one will tell you that you have visited some sites x times during last year, he will know just that you did it last week. (There is better way to deal with this, that is 'privacy' mode, but as far as I know it won't be in Firefox 3).

Comment 8

[Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath]]

I agree with Ivan that private browsing mode would be nice, and mitigate a lot of the concern here, but he's right that we won't get it for Firefox 3.

Ivan: You still have the "0 days of history" option, because that setting in the preferences is a checkbox - turn it off and firefox will no longer keep any history.

Given that, I agree with Mike that further specification of minimums and maximums overcomplicates things for a use case "I think my privacy will be violated 5 days from now" that seems sort of unlikely.

As Mike says, the reason it's on the privacy pane is because of the checkbox, to enable or disable it.  The number-of-days setting is definitely more of a performance thing, but moving the option anywhere else on those grounds would be moving the checkbox out of privacy settings, which seems even more confusing.

(In reply to comment #7)
> My primary objection is that one was able to set history to zero and prevent
> Firefox from remembering anything anytime, and I am not aware that it is
> possible now through Options dialog.

Since Ivan does have the ability to turn off history (I think maybe he just didn't notice the checkbox?) and since the wording adequately reflects the intent of the setting which is behaving as-designed, I think we probably want to WONTFIX this.  But I'll hold off in case Jesse or Dan have dissenting opinions?

Comment 9

[Ivan Ičin]

(In reply to comment #8)
> Since Ivan does have the ability to turn off history (I think maybe he just
> didn't notice the checkbox?) and since the wording adequately reflects the
> intent of the setting which is behaving as-designed, I think we probably want
> to WONTFIX this.  But I'll hold off in case Jesse or Dan have dissenting
> opinions?
> 

I have good and bad news :) :
Good news: I haven't seen checkbox
Bad news: I haven't seen checkbox

My intuition is that old users will just miss it. New users will probably find it. OK, this is wontfix. But I feel like there should be performance tab in Options/Advanced where one could see following options:
- Cache
- how long to keep History
- how long to keep Search (this doesn't exist and over time search dropdown gets overcrowded...)