832738 - Cannot switch off new tab thumbnail generation

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[David Bhalla]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:18.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0
Build ID: 20130116073211

Steps to reproduce:

I have been trying to disable thumbnail generation, but this seems impossible to do.

in about config, I have:

browser.newtab.url > Set to about:blank (also tried leaving empty, and "Google.com")

browser.newtabpage.enabled > false

Created: browser.pagethumbnails.capturing_disabled > true

services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.newtabpage.enabled > false

Still Firefox creates thumbnails for every non-https page I view. This includes full readable text of all of my private emails typed in mail2web, my search queries in Google, visits to medical sites, and everything else.

Turning on Private Browsing makes no difference. I have the cache set to zero, and "Do not remember history" enabled.

The thumbnails can either be read from the AppData Firefox folder, or thumbs older than about an hour are insecurely deleted by Firefox, so can be easily recovered from my hard disk using free Recuva software. I see about 600 insecure deletions per day, which forms a history of everything I've ever looked at or typed into Firefox for at least the past few months just sitting on my hard disk.

This behavior was first noticed by me in Firefox 17 and 18. I am using Vista, which Firefox is supposed to be compatible with.

I'd be grateful for any help, as this is a massive privacy issue.

David


Actual results:

Thumbnails always generated.


Expected results:

Thumbnails should have stopped.

Comment 2

[Mardeg]

In http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/941770 the following prefs seem to have worked, setting:

browser.pagethumbnails.storage_version
to 2, and

browser.pageThumbs.enabled
to false

Comment 3

[David Bhalla]

Thanks for the replies, Mardeg.

None of the setting made any difference. I already had 

browser.pagethumbnails.storage_version Set to 2

And I created,

browser.pageThumbs.enabled (in lowercase and with upper T) set to false.

No change. Still every page is generated as a thumb (19 items since I began typing this message, based on 3 tabs open). I am using the latest 18.1.

The problem is not resolved.

David

Comment 4

[Mardeg]

(In reply to David Bhalla from comment #0)
> This behavior was first noticed by me in Firefox 17 and 18. I am using
> Vista
Which version specifically did you set browser.pagethumbnails.capturing_disabled to true in, what is the type of that pref, and did you restart Firefox after setting it?
Currently that pref is working for me.

Comment 5

[David Bhalla]

Mardeg,

browser.pagethumbnails.capturing_disabled > true

This definitely did nothing to help. I did restart and trying typing the Boolean in 18 and 18.1.

I recreated,

browser.pageThumbs.enabled > false

This did the trick the second time. Thumbnail generation has stopped, so perhaps I made a mistake entering the phrase the first time round.

Thank you for your help.

David

(In reply to Mardeg from comment #4)
> (In reply to David Bhalla from comment #0)
> > This behavior was first noticed by me in Firefox 17 and 18. I am using
> > Vista
> Which version specifically did you set
> browser.pagethumbnails.capturing_disabled to true in, what is the type of
> that pref, and did you restart Firefox after setting it?
> Currently that pref is working for me.