423266 - Address bar dropdown remembers recently visited URLs even though history has been cleared

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 422548

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Shwetabh]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b4) Gecko/2008030714 Firefox/3.0b4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b4) Gecko/2008030714 Firefox/3.0b4

Whenever I visit a link website and traverse the links on the webpage, the links automatically get added in the address bar. For example: I typed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org. After that I created a bugzilla account. 
Now typically, only https://bugzilla.mozilla.org should be present in the address bar. However, it now contains the address of every link I traversed on the page. This becomes a serious privacy matter

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Type any website address in the address bar.
2.Traverse a few links on the page.
3.Check the entries in the address bar.
Actual Results:  
All the links traversed come up in the address bar

Expected Results:  
Only the website address should have been present in the address bar.

This issue has cropped up with firefox 3 beta 4. It wasn't present in earlier releases.

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

What do you mean by step 3, "Check the entries in the address bar"?

Comment 2

[Shwetabh]

Click on the drop-down button of address bar. Ideally only the website address we typed in the address bar should be displayed. However, in this case, the drop down list shows all the links we traversed on the page.

Comment 3

[Shwetabh]

Attachment: Screenshot of the issue

Here is what I did:
I have two bookmarks in the bookmark toolbar -> Latest Headlines(BBC) and Digg and my homepage is google.
Clicked on Tools->Clear Private Data.
Checked on all boxes except Cookies and Saved Passwords.
Clicked on drop down button of addressbar.
None of the links displayed were visited by me.

Comment 4

[Benjamin Huot]

I have the same problem. Clearing Private Data with all options selected in
preferences doesn't delete the drop down list entries of website names and
addresses under the location bar. I just find it very annoying. I like to keep
my data in folders and organized. I don't like my data floating around my file
system in places I didn't specifically put it. This is keeping me from using
Firefox. I experienced this problem with Firefox 3 beta 4 on Mac OS X 10.4.11
PPC 1.33 GHz G4 with 1 GB RAM and 13 GB free space.

Comment 5

[Shwetabh]

I suggest we agree that there are two bugs here:

1. Address bar drop down list automatically stores every link visited on a webpage.
2. Address bar drop down list remembers recently visited URLs even after history has been cleared.

If needed, a new bug may be opened for one of these issues. 

Comment 6

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

It's always shown pages that you've visited. Perhaps you were browsing with this pref set to true?

browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped

Comment 7

[Shwetabh]

(In reply to comment #6)
> It's always shown pages that you've visited. Perhaps you were browsing with
> this pref set to true?
> 
> browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped
> 

None of the config values were changed from their default values. Even then, I checked it's value. It's false.

Comment 8

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

About clearing history. It cleared your history, so it's just your bookmarks that are being shown.

Comment 9

[Shwetabh]

However, I took the screenshot *after* clearing the history. Once the history has been cleaned, even bookmarks should not be displayed in the list. Secondly, only 1st, 2nd and 7th items are present in the bookmarks. Rest have been traversed by the browser itself. IMHO this is *not* acceptable. 

Comment 11

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

Interesting comment about the screenshot - why are place: uri's showing up?

Comment 12

[Stephen Donner [:stephend] Not actively reading bugmail]

Verified dup