863840 - Clear recent history in a normal window deletes DOM storage in a private window

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect, P5)

Description

[Ian Nartowicz]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0
Build ID: 20130107124423

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open a normal browser window.
2. Open a private browsing window and navigate to a page that sets DOM storage items.
3. From the normal window, select clear recent history and remove cookies (includes DOM storage) for all time ranges.


Actual results:

1. Cookies in the private browsing window were apparently not touched, although it is difficult to examine them. I tested that I stayed logged in to a forum.
2. DOM storage was removed.
3. No "dom-storage2-changed" observer notification was generated to the private browsing window even though its DOM storage was nuked.


Expected results:

1. In the private browsing window, cookies and DOM storage should not be touched.
2. Whenever a DOM storage area is changed, the notification (and events) should be sent.  Although in this case, it would be preferable that the storage was left alone and there was no need for the events.

This was tested in Firefox 23 nightly, so using the new storage code.  The same thing happens when nsICookieManager.removeAll() is called.  Private browsing cookies are not touched, but DOM storage in private browsing windows is nuked.

Comment 1

[Ian Nartowicz]

Correction: dom-storage2-changed is not notified for any clear recent history action, nor are storage events generated.  I was seeing a cookie-changed notification (aData == "cleared") in the normal window, and obviously nothing in the private browsing window.  Not sure if that is correct or not.  The spec says an event should be sent when the clear() method is called, which it effectively has been, whatever the implementation behind the scenes is.

Still, I'd rather private browsing storage wasn't cleared from a non-private-browsing window.

Comment 2

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1472046

Move all DOM bugs that haven’t been updated in more than 3 years and has no one currently assigned to P5.

If you have questions, please contact :mdaly.