660543 - When Trying to Delete Part of History, All History Was Deleted

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Places, defect)

Description

[David E. Ross]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20110511 SeaMonkey/2.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20110511 SeaMonkey/2.1 (RC1)

Using Ctrl-H on my keyboard, I obtained the History window.  I selected the April folder.  I selected Delete on my Keyboard.  The History window went blank.  I was able to verify that I no longer have any history.  

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Removing a history container removes all history entries for the pages inside that container (for privacy reasons, if you remove a container we consider you want to remove all visits to the pages inside it), not only visits in that month. Is this what happened in your case?

Comment 2

[David E. Ross]

Yes.  It being the end of May, I tried to delete history from April.  I did this because there is no longer a capability to expire history by age.  See bug #643254.

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

If you visited the same pages in April and May, what happened is what the system was designed for, in such a case this would be an enh request rather than a bug.
The fact it may be surprising is a different problem.

Comment 4

[David E. Ross]

If I visited a Web page in April and then again in May, the history of that visit should reflect only the latest visit.  The URI should no longer appear in the April folder.  

Deleting April should not affect May.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

To clarify, the idea of removing a page from history has clear use-cases:
- "please get rid of this page from my history"
- "please remove this page from my locationbar"
- avoid "I just removed this page from history, but it still appears in the locationbar/history" (user not noticing he removed the page from a date container, so only a part of the visits)
The third case especially was a pretty much reported bug in the past.
Btw, I think that the by-date grouping is confusing for the user in this case, thus we should take into account this design problem when working on a new UI to search and manage history.

Comment 6

[David E. Ross]

What you fail to address is "remove old entries from my history".  In this case, an old entry is a Web page that I have not visited recently.  I never expected that visiting a Web page again would generate a new entry and leave a prior history entry.  I certainly did not expect that deleting all entries from a month ago would also delete entries from this month.

Comment 7

[al_9x]

Since you are refusing to support automatic temporal expiration, there should at least be a manual equivalent, which incidentally you have recommended, except as OP discovered it does not work.

Deleting within a date range should not delete all history for the included sites.  There is already a way to do that: deleting when grouped by site and forget about this site.  Deleting withing a date range should do the expected thing and expire the visits within it, there is no other way to achieve this.  This is particularly important now that automatic temporal expiration has been removed.

Comment 8

[LL]

Would this work in 2.1 as a workaround?
Group by: None, Sort by: Last visited. Then shift-click to select a chunk of the bottom of the list, hit Delete.

Comment 9

[David E. Ross]

After saving my profile, I tried the workaround.  With my history grouped by none and sorted by last visited, neither the Delete key nor [Edit > Delete] from the History window menu bar worked.  (The latter was NOT greyed out.)  Nothing was deleted.

Comment 10

[David E. Ross]

Re my comment #9:  The inability to delete any entries is now bug #686326.

Comment 12

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

works by design