493124 - Deleting a closed page in history does not delete its instance as a recently closed tab

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[Fraxtil]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10

After deleting an item from Firefox's history, whether the tab or window has been closed or not, it is possible to recover the item by opening the recently closed tabs (Ctrl+Shift+Tab if it is the most recent). While this may be intended, there should at least be a way to clear the recently opened tabs list without clearing the entire history of Firefox or closing all instances of Firefox.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open any page in a tab.
2. Close the tab and delete the single item from the history.
3. Press Ctrl+Shift+T to re-open the tab.
Actual Results:  
The deleted history item is recoverable by using the "Recently Closed Tabs" tool.

Expected Results:  
The item should be removed from tab history as well.

Comment 1

[Cleo]

I can confirm this as well in 3.5.

Comment 2

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Forget about this site? Right click on any history entry and click "Forget about this site".

Comment 3

[Paul O'Shannessy [:zpao] (not bugmail, email directly)]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Forget about this site? Right click on any history entry and click "Forget
> about this site".

This should work. I think the reporter is talking "Delete this page".

Something to think about is that when you delete the page, it doesn't close the tab it's active in. It also won't delete the history item from active tabs. So I think there really needs to be more work identifying how that feature works as a whole. There might already be a bug on that...

Comment 4

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

Adding keywords to get input from UX people on this.

Comment 7

[Yuan Wang(:Yuan) – Mobile Firefox Design Lead]

Thanks for catching this.
From the UX perspective, I believe deleting a CLOSED page in history should delete its instance as a recently closed tab. 

In the menu, the "History" currently includes a full list of browsing history, also the recent stored containers(tabs, windows, session). When user clicks to edit history in the History window, the result should apply across every other section, such as recently closed tabs/windows/session. 

One scenario to be aware of is that when user deletes an ACTIVE page in history, the feedback should only be the active page is deleted from the list of history. The active tab page should not be closed from browser. If user closes the active tab later on, that activity should still be recorded and shown in the group of "recently closed tabs".

Comment 8

[Paul O'Shannessy [:zpao] (not bugmail, email directly)]

Yuan, let's make sure we cover this completely. You talked about removing the closed tab, but I think that's probably overkill. To make it clear how it works, a closed tab contains a list of pages visited in it.

There are a few different cases:
1. The deleted page is in the history of a closed tab, but was not the last visited page
2. The deleted page is the last visited page of a closed tab, but there are other history entries.
3. The deleted page is the only visited page of a closed tab.

For 1, it seems like we should just remove the deleted item from history. The tab can still be restored but there will be no indication that deletedsite.com was visited.
For 2, it's less obvious. Closing the tab might make sense here, but it's a heavier hammer. There may well be valuable history in that tab.
For 3, removing the tab entirely makes sense.

Could you clarify/re-evaluate so that if somebody comes to pick this bug up, there's a clear path. Thanks!

Comment 9

[Yuan Wang(:Yuan) – Mobile Firefox Design Lead]

Paul, thanks for the reply. The separate cases you listed made things clearer. I had an incomplete understanding of closed tabs. Now everything makes better sense for me. Now i am re-evaluating my suggestions on this.  

I agree with your main suggestions, with slightly different points. 
For 1: just remove the deleted item from history. Tab can be restored. 
Correct me if I am wrong. But I think the indication of the site should still exist. "Forget this site" does the job of removing the records of visiting deletedsite.com.

For 2: I agree that killing the whole closed tab would be overkill. It should be deleting item in history. 

For 3: Removing the tab. Agreed. 

(I will keep my thoughts on this topic. For 2, maybe it's possible to show the second last page as the recently closed tab instead. But I don't have the evidence that whether people consider the closed tabs as part of the history instances yet. If they do, then the deleted page should not be restored from recently closed tab.)

Thanks for clarifying this, Paul.

Comment 10

[Paul O'Shannessy [:zpao] (not bugmail, email directly)]

In reply to Yuan Wang(:Yuan) – Firefox UX Team from comment #9)
> Paul, thanks for the reply. The separate cases you listed made things
> clearer. I had an incomplete understanding of closed tabs. Now everything
> makes better sense for me. Now i am re-evaluating my suggestions on this.  

For some further confusion / clarification: "forget about this site" works - it will remove the whole closed tab if any items in it match the domain being deleted. So for all of my cases presented above, the closed tab will be deleted (as well as open tabs in closed windows).

So we should either just match that, or change that behavior to match whatever we do here.

> I agree with your main suggestions, with slightly different points. 
> For 1: just remove the deleted item from history. Tab can be restored. 
> Correct me if I am wrong. But I think the indication of the site should
> still exist. "Forget this site" does the job of removing the records of
> visiting deletedsite.com.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here about "the indication of the site should still exist".

Let's say you have this... a.com > deleteme.com/badpage > b.com in your closed tab, then you remove deleteme.com/badpage from history, I intended that to change the closed tab's history to a.com > b.com

Based on what we do for "forget about this site", I'm not so sure anymore.

Comment 11

[Ada [:adalucinet]]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:26.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/26.0
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:28.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/28.0

This issue is still reproducible with Firefox 26 beta 5 (Build ID: 20131114085019) and latest Nightly (Build ID: 20131114030204); like the actual results from comment 0, after deleting (Delete This Page) an entry from History, it's still recoverable by opening the "Recently Closed Tabs" (Ctrl+Shift+T). Even if the closed and deleted website is opened with Ctrl+Shift+T, it doesn't appear in the History until I hit enter in the URL bar.

Comment 12

[dickhackin]

This also occurs with recently closed windows. I attempted to delete all history except form filling and was surprised to find that recently closed tabs and recently closed windows still contained the stuff I had wanted deleted.

Comment 14

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field for this bug is relatively low, S3. However, the bug has 3 duplicates.
:dao, could you consider increasing the bug severity?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 15

[BugBot (nomail) [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The last needinfo from me was triggered in error by recent activity on the bug. I'm clearing the needinfo since this is a very old bug and I don't know if it's still relevant.