640451 - Visible-link color remains forever (or 180 days?)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[John Holland]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0

You fixed bugs 477882 and 549340 in 4.0 to allow visited-link colors between frames to be stored in history. Now history can no longer be restricted to a few days (bug 596244), meaning that visited links will retain their visited-link color forever (or 180 days?), negating the use of *all* links for bookmarks. What other purpose does the visited-link color serve? I don't care about history; I never use it. I care about and am submitting this bug about the *visited-link color* retention. *Please* return to Firefox 3.0 (and IE) visited-link behavior!

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Visit a link.
2. Wait 179 days without visiting again the link.
3. Look at the link.
Actual Results:  
1. Its color changes to the visited-link color.
2. The color of the link is not affected.
3. The link still exhibits its visited-link color.

Expected Results:  
The link should revert to its unvisited-link color after a number of days that I specify; I normally use three days. I want to repeat the behavior of Firefox 3.0, and of all Netscape and IE browsers from at least 2.0.

What is "history" supposed to do? I had thought for years that it merely retains URLs, but reading recently about the Places file growing to 45 MB made me think that maybe history actually retains in a cache the entire pages of the visited sites. If so, I certainly neither want nor need it: I have my pages refreshed at every visit. Anyway, if you want to separate from history the retention of the visited-link color, be my guest. I suffered with the visited-link problem through Firefox 3.5 and 3.6; 4.0 has altered the problem to make it worse. Due to other problems with Chrome and Opera, and to the demise of Netscape, it appears that the only browser that I now can use and recommend is IE. What can I do if I move to Linux? THIS PROBLEM IS SEVERE.

Comment 1

[Alex Lakatos[:AlexLakatos]]

Marking this as WONTFIX as for bug 596244 and bug 520165.