424992 - Firefox3: Privacy: not possible to delete history directly without deleting bookmarks with third party tools (places.sqlite)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 384420

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement)

Description

[peter]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Build Identifier: FireFox3: version3.0b5pre

In FF3 is not possible to delete history without deleting bookmarks with third-party tools (going though OS file system) because they are stored together in one file places.sqlite.

This bug is not related to bugs 422548 and 395299. It is minor, but important, change request.

It would be nice the explicit user bookmarks are stored in a separate file, and the automatic history links to another file. They can be still presented uniformly to the user in the interface, but having separate files, would allow to delete the history file, without changing the bookmarks without using FireFox.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
- always present
Actual Results:  
In the FF2 it was possible to delete all the history by deleting its related files without going though FireFox and without having to delete the explicit user bookmarks.

The FF3 places.sqlite file contains now all bookmarks and browsing history together. While it is (or will be) possible to manage and delete history from within FF3, it seems it is not possible to delete only history anymore directly (via the OS file system) without using FireFox.

Despite the good will of the FF3 team for privacy, and the fact they tell the sqlite to set the data to 0 when deleted, there are many reason why deleting such data directly without going though FireFox should be offered as an option. For users like myself, the data are not really deleted unless properly scrambled with proper specialized tools, which usually work on complete files.

In FF3, the only safe option is to delete (wipe/shred) completely the places.sqlite file, but this will result in deleting also the explicit bookmars the use has remembered.


Expected Results:  
The possibility to support such independent clean up of history is important for privacy and should be considered in FF3. What is possible via FF3 interface is quite good and could be improved, but the independent way should be always supported. FF2 had an advantage again IE for this, because in IE index.dat is shared by shell and the browser.

If this is not done, for me personally - and I guess for many others, it means I have to switch with great pain to alternative browsers which still write the explicit bookmarks and automatic history files separately.

Comment 1

[peter]

User-agent above is wrong. I submitted the bug from FireFox3 with user-agent set explicitly to the IE one.

Comment 2

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

It's possible because you can use sqlite to delete the history.
This is no valid bug but it's valid as enhancement

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

splitting the file into history.sqlite and bookmarks.sqlite would not work, because both history and bookmarks are referring to a commond places table. So yes you would delete the history (visits), but urls would be still there, so that would only give a false sense of privacy.

However this is a dupe, there is already a bug about this

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