642360 - History | Clear Recent History... proposes "Everything" as the time range to clear

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Kim Wagstaff]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0

When the "Clear Recent History..." menu item is selected from the "History" menu, the dialog box comes up with "Everything" as the "Time range to clear". I suspect the intent would be to offer "Last Hour" as the initial value. Fortunately there is a warning that all selected items will be cleared and cannot be recovered.

This occurs in Firefox/4.0 RC1.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Click Firefox menu
2. Click History >
3. Click Clear Recent History...
Actual Results:  
Clear All History (dialog box)

Time range to clear: Everything

! All selected items will be cleared.
  This action cannot be undone.

^ Details

...

    [Clear Now]  [Cancel]

Expected Results:  
Time range to clear: One Hour

No warning box.

While not a critical bug in my opinion, it could easily result in unrecoverable data loss.

My apologies if I missed this bug in the database--I did look for anything similar. :-)

Comment 1

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

I believe it is because you used "everything" last time you cleared the history. It remembers the last used state. Try a fresh profile to double check

Comment 2

[Kim Wagstaff]

Yes, that appears to be the case, and the initial value was One Hour.

Would it make sense to change the Menu item to "Clear History..." instead, since recent is not (always) an accurate description?

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

When "Clear recent history" label was decided, these features were frozen this way, so I think it was not an unwanted behavior. Going only to Clear History would make the user think that can only be used to remove everything, rather than a tool to remove history by a timeframe.
Sure it could be improved, but based on the request in the bug and the fact each bug should have only one issue reported, I consider this wfm since it's working as designed.

Comment 4

[Dan Jacobson]

Please do not have it say Everything.
That is confusing.
Say "Entire time range" or "All times" etc.