445302 - Frecency score of bookmarks not set to zero when history is cleared and bookmark scoring set to zero

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Euchre]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008061004 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008061004 Firefox/3.0

If the visited and unvisited bookmark frecency score preferences are set to zero after visiting a bookmarked URL and history is cleared, the frecency score for those bookmarks visited are not set to zero and thus still appear in the location bar dropdown completion list. Effectively the change in preference for bookmark frecency scoring should place the value at zero and effectively remove all location bar dropdown completion history.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Visit one or more bookmarks.
2.Set the values of places.frecency.bookmarkVisitBonus and places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus to zero via about:config.
3.Clear history.
4.Type any character that occurs in the URL or page title of the previously visited bookmark. Alternatively or additionally, open places.sqlite and observe the value of the bookmarks frecency score.
Actual Results:  
Entries for bookmarks visited appear in location bar dropdown completion list. Frecency score in places.sqlite for previously visited bookmarks is not reset to zero.

Expected Results:  
No entries appear in location bar dropdown completion list. Frecency score in places.sqlite for previously visited bookmarks is reset to zero.

All other items from history previously expected to be cleared based on Firefox 3 behaviors are so when history is cleared in Firefox 3. The items act as if the URLs were typed in, instead of visited via any other means. I used the bookmarks menu to reproduce this, so that I did not enter any information into the location bar to invoke bookmark results with the frecency scoring for bookmarks enabled. Despite the value of places.frecency.linkVisitBonus not being zero, items in places.sqlite created via the respective means were cleared when history was cleared. This adds to the apparent inconsistency of behavior. This effectively means that 'Clear Private Data' is not respected, and thus the expectation of the named action's result is not completed.

Comment 1

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

You've got two issues here - bookmarks are going to show up in the location bar even if their frecency is at 0.

Comment 2

[Euchre]

Setting the preferences places.frecency.bookmarkVisitBonus and
places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus to zero is supposed to remove the bookmarks from the location bar, and it does if the bookmarks are unvisited previous to setting that value. I don't know where you get the impression that the bookmarks always show up in the location bar dropdown when those are set to zero, I can reproduce the removal from results when unvisited fine. Many, many people have done this to achieve their removal from the dropdown results. All other frecency scores except the typed links (which is noted in the bug as a separate behavior) fall to zero when history is cleared.

I am especially able to observe this problem because I removed all default bookmarks immediately after install. I didn't add any in, and I had read about the location bar changes and reactions to it. I disabled bookmarks showing up in results via the frecency preference, then migrated my bookmarks from Camino afterwards. The bookmarks did not show up in the location bar dropdown at all, visited or unvisited. after hearing of this issue, I reset bookmark frecency scoring and visited 2 bookmarks, then set the prefs back to zero, and cleared history. The bookmark frecency score remains, and thus the results still appear in the dropdown. This behavior is not analogous to what occurs with any other frecency score pref. They immediately fall to zero and remain at zero if their frecency score pref is set to zero.

Comment 3

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

This is probably because frecency isn't something calculated right away. It waits for the browser to be idle to recalculate things.

The Hide Unvisited add-on will actively remove bookmarks that you haven't visited (e.g., after clearing your history or deleting the page).
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7429

Comment 4

[Josh Wand]

related to bug 423507 ?

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

doing frecency calculation immediately would be quite expensive, so wontfixing this, suggested addon in comment 3 is a good workaround

Comment 6

[Euchre]

I don't quite understand why there's a difference in the apparent brute force change of other items' values to zero when history is cleared and doing the same for bookmarks in the same SQLite file. It doesn't take a recalculation of any kind to just set a given field to zero in the DB. It's been demonstrated that clearing history sets the items to zero and doesn't actually remove all of them from the DB, so it doesn't really make much sense to me why the zeroing of the value would be so hard. Why is there a difference in function between clearing history for any other URL and bookmarks, when writing to the field of the DB ought to be the same anyway?

Comment 7

[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