891555 - Downloading files from mega.co.nz leaves indexedDB copies behind in the profile

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Emanuel Hoogeveen [:ehoogeveen]]

The indexedDB in day-to-day profile is currently ~831 MiB. About 100 MiB of this is from the Unreal Engine demo, but the rest is from a few files I downloaded from mega.co.nz.

There's no way for me to clean them short of deleting the directories - even checking every option in the "Clear Recent History..." dialog doesn't get rid of them! (probably worth a separate bug, but I wanted to file this first)

I'm not sure whether this is an issue with IndexedDB, or mega.co.nz being dumb. Either way, *something* should be cleaning up these copies.

STR:
1) From a clean profile, download a large file from mega.co.nz, e.g. https://mega.co.nz/#!c8UC2KbT!OQM4jyg7u3lNeNlfFokHFx2aK-t1n2SuU6ObvRMJSfU
2) After saving the file to disk, observe that the indexedDB directory in your profile is now as big as the file you downloaded, even after closing the tab to mega.co.nz.

Comment 1

[Ben Turner (not reading bugmail, use the needinfo flag!)]

This is an issue with the web site and I'd encourage you to contact them about it. The site is either intentionally or unintentionally keeping that data around even after the download is completed and the file saved to your target directory.

If you want to delete *all* the data that the web site has stored on your computer you can use the "Page Info" feature to do it. See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/page-info-window-view-technical-details-about-page#w_maintain-offline-storage to see the controls. You can click the "Clear Storage" button to remove the databases.

Sorry that this particular form of storage is difficult to clear, there are bugs open on trying to improve our UI.

Comment 2

[Emanuel Hoogeveen [:ehoogeveen]]

I sent a bug report to mega.co.nz describing the issue last week, but haven't heard back yet.

I'm morphing this bug into a tech evangelism bug since I think this is a serious issue with mega.co.nz that people will blame on Firefox, and I don't think I have the clout to reach them personally.

From what Ben says, this is an issue on their end and they could (should) be cleaning up after themselves.

Comment 3

[Calvin Englehart]

I have a problem downloading photos with Firefox V23.0.1, but it works fine on IE V10. The site in question url is: [ http://www.atlantagasprices.com/Mem_log_in.aspx ]. After I log in I go to my profile and select a photo album then tell it I' going to download another photo to it, select my file from my computer, then tell it to download. It appears to be doing some thing but never finishes. Using IE V10 when it downloads it completes it in seconds with no problems. But I'd like to stay in Firefox, is it possibly a site problem or ours? Calvin

Comment 4

[j7n]

Mega leaves the data on disk intentionally, and does the same in other browsers, like Opera 15 (rebranded Chromium), which uses a different File System storage instead of IndexedDB. In both cases, complete decrypted files remain on disk indefinitely, but are split into chunks in Firefox. One might ask, where is the "security" and "privacy" advertised by Mega.

I've created a shortcut in my file manager to the directory where indexedDB is, and am deleting its contents manually.

Comment 5

[Emanuel Hoogeveen [:ehoogeveen]]

mega.co.nz no longer works at all for me without the extension, and they've been updating that pretty frequently recently (it's now up to version 2.0.61). Using the extension, this problem doesn't occur. It's a pity that they can't get this working right without an extension, but at least I don't have to worry about my profile growing to ridiculous sizes anymore, and they offer the extension to all Firefox users who visit MEGA.