477547 - History will not clear.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Sol]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011912 Firefox/3.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011912 Firefox/3.0.6

On Craigslist.org page when one selects a category (i.e. under jobs  select Biotech/Science) the history remembers you selected this by changing the font color from Blue (=unselected) to purple(=selected previously). When I try to clear history using the "clear browsing history" it will not turn the craigslist selections back to the unselected state. The only way I can get this back to the unselected state is to uncheck the "save my history for at least" option on the preference page. If I recheck it, the selected items on Craigslist return. I even left the save history unselected for four days and then re checked the box for "save my history for the last 3 days" and still it shows all the catagories I selected on Craigslist in the past. The "remember what I enter in forms and the searchbar" has no effect on this checked or unchecked. Note: I run the extension "Session Saver" with Firefox 3.0.6 and clearing this as well as browsing history, cache, offline website data. autheticated sessions has no effect on deselecting the previously selected Craigslist items.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Select category on the main page of Craigslist.org and the will change from blue to purple indicating these categories have been previously selected.
2. Then go toClear private data Checked = "Session Manager Saved sessions", Browsing History", "Cache", "Offline Website Data", "Authenticated Sessions".
3.Reload Craigslist page.


Actual Results:  
Previously selected  items  on the Craigslist main page remain purple.

Expected Results:  
Browsing History should have been cleared and all categories on the mainpage should be in the unselected blue color.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Do you get this in the Firefox safemode ?
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode

This is wfm with FF3.0.6, links returning to the previous color if I clear the history.

Comment 2

[Sol]

OK, I just tried this in safe mode and the problem remains the same.

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

You are sure that you entered the safemode and got the safemode dialog at startup ?
Sorry that I ask but I can't reprodiuce the issue and that could mean that this is caused by addons or different settings in Firefox.

Comment 4

[Sol]

Yes I'm positive and got the safe mode dialog box when I did the safemode start.
However one thing I noticed is that even though I got the safemode dialog box, when I proceeded the browser opened up all the tabs from my previous session, which I didn't think was possible with the session manager add-on turned off in safe mode. Further now I also saved all the open tabs as a save all tabs bookmark and uninstalled Session manager and it still open up my previous session tabs upon closing and reopening. When I went back to the Save all tabs bookmarks (25 tabs in all) and selected open all tabs option it opened 25 tabs with most being the same bugztlla page I was last on. So maybe my browser is corrupted or something. Not sure what's happening here now. Any ideas what to do?

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

You can try to create an additional profile for testing:
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing+profiles

Comment 6

[Sol]

Thanks for the advice. I created a new profile (SL1) and tried to recreate the problem and could not (so the new profile works correctly); so I then went to the default (original) profile and under about:config tried to change the "user set" settings where I could one at a time, and then clearing private data as before and reloading the page to see if it cleared, reset the value if it didn't work etc.etc.--> but I have not been able to get the original profile to clear the history (mainly the ones where it's boolean true:false or integer options-- some I have no idea how to change). Any ideas on where I might look to trouble shoot as I'm no expert at this stuff or: can I just delete the old profile and save or transfer all my bookmarks to the newer profile?

Comment 7

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

You can delete to old profile, and migrate your stuff to the new. http://support.mozilla.com can help you with that.

Comment 8

[Sol]

Thanks for the help and here's what happened. I created a new profile (GL1) and copied the the bookmark file places.sqlite from the original problematic profile into the new profile (GL1) and then went to craigslist and this  page showed the same selected items (=puple color) as the original default profile and it will not clear now just like the original problem. Go figure the only thing I need from the old profile is where the problem lies.

Comment 9

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

You can export the bookmarks as html from your old profile and import them into the new one instead of copying the places.sqlite directly.
You can also export your bookmarks as html, move your places.sqlite to a different location (but don't delete it) while FF isn't running and import the htm. I hope exporting works because we had a bug with exporting sometimes not working in 3.0.X.

I don't know how your places file got corrupt, do you use security seftware on your system that modifies our files like Spybot, CCleaner ?

Comment 10

[Sol]

Thanks Matti. I found an article on support and followed that where I deleted the places.sqlite on the original default profile and then started up FF where it said it would rebuild it from the Bookmark backup. That worked in that I could then clear the Craigslist page. The only thing was alot of the bookmarks especially at the bottom of the book marks folders or menu (say the bottom six of 50), where all showing the same url which was basically the last page I opened FF on. Deleted those and all is OK for now. I appreciate you folks helping me out and directing me to solutions as I learned a bunch about how to troubleshoot future problems.

Comment 11

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

That should not happen but it can happen if external security software writes in our database files (places.sqlite). If you use such software that tries to clear Firefox files (soybot, ccleaner,..) it can happen again but reat that it works again for you.