128.0 Unified History: Simpler, but worse

[papawpatriot]

The former history clearing options provide more control over cookies and site data, as well as providing the ability to clear data and cookies cache without logging out of signed in accounts. 

Now, those sets of data just grow.

Simplifying fixed something that wasn't necessarily broken, but now it is.

[Dricera]

100% agreed. I don't know why as Mozilla you would go this route, when one of your main selling points is the amount of control you offer to users compared to chrome. I hope they revert this, but in the long term if this trend of "change-for-the-sake-of-change" backward decisions continue I will look into migrating my data onto a usable fork.

[Dan]

Did you have some very popular fork in mind btw?

[OutlawHusbando]

Please revert the changes, this is really really bad, why do you force us to delete both Offline Website Data and Cookies, we don't want in many cases because deleting OWD is more useful to speed up Firefox, Firefox with massive OWD is slower.

[Dan]

Yes it's awful. Having to use an about:config preference as workaround is the most userunfriendly thing

[jscher2000]

I understand the impulse to simplify Firefox and make it more similar to the dominant browser, but when an "expert" feature already exists, it would be preferable to have an "advanced" switch so users can easily manage settings in detail rather than removing the option for everyone.

But to make sure we can keep even the current workaround, it would be helpful if people could describe how having the settings separated is useful to them. For example, this Reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e02vcv/

What workaround? See:

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@Dan wrote:

Yes it's awful. Having to use an about:config preference as workaround is the most userunfriendly thing

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For everyone's reference, I think this refers to the following (probably temporary) preference:

(A) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button accepting the risk.

More info on about:config: Configuration Editor for Firefox. Please keep in mind that changes made through this back door aren't fully supported and aren't guaranteed to continue working in the future.

(B) In the search box in the page, type or paste OldClearHistory and pause while the list is filtered

(C) Double-click the privacy.sanitize.useOldClearHistoryDialog preference to switch the value from false to true

[Dan]

Yes, privacy.sanitize.useOldClearHistoryDialog is exactly what I meant. Btw, afaik users can simply paste that exact same string into the searchbar and directly double-click without having to make step (B), or? And, jscher, do you know by chance if this change was a team decision or if one person implemented this and it simply passed QA somehow?

[suikaz]

the huge issue basically every software maker nowadays seems to miss is the difference between *simple* and *limited*

*limited* usually is **harder** to use due to lack of some features

[Alexey104]

Please, if you keep this new clear history dialog, at least do not remove the `privacy.sanitize.useOldClearHistoryDialog` option in future versions.

[ivan1]

I see zero reason for this change, which i found about today when i was searching how to clear site data after not finding it in settings. They 100% must bring back old menu, firefox user base is comparatively small and has bigger advanced user percentage and they think its good idea to remove "advanced" features. I put it in quotes because i dont even consider it advanced but we live in 2024

[tjn21]

I agree.  I never use the browser offline so I do not want to keep that data.

[danmhi]

Hi everyone. I just want to highlight that we're appreciative and are paying attention to all the feedback.

[only_me]

I use an addon to curate cookies and protect ONLY those I need to keep a site functioning & logged in, all others are deleted automatically - the addon also happens to be able to clear local storage & indexedDB junk as well.

I do not want all my cookies wiped out along with everything else.

With this new change the addon stopped deleting IndexedDB crap related to every site I happened to have visited - so it came as a great disappointment to see this had been interfered with and disrupting the workflow yet again !

Thankfully by chance I just found out about the privacy.sanitize.useOldClearHistoryDialog which has reverted the behavious back to how it was and should be.

So that is the reason I would like to see this preference kept available.

[glfire]

In another forum, a user suggests that the new history deletion dialog box included a transition to a newer data scheme, and re-enabling the old one with the option mentioned in the above posts may cause data loss ...

Does anyone have details regarding this aspect of the new data scheme and possible data loss ?

[jscher2000]

@glfire wrote:

In another forum, a user suggests that the new history deletion dialog box included a transition to a newer data scheme, and re-enabling the old one with the option mentioned in the above posts may cause data loss ...

Does anyone have details regarding this aspect of the new data scheme and possible data loss ?

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First, I don't think there would be a way to switch the display setting this easily if there was a serious risk that switching between more or fewer checkboxes would erase your existing data.

That said, there are separate preferences in prefs.js/about:config for each dialog, so you should review the selections carefully both before and after making the change to avoid more destructive selections from the simpler dialog carrying over to the more detailed dialog (or in case the preference were to flip back).

Second, there is work underway now to restore separate checkboxes for browsing/download history and form/search history, in bug #1888466 (please don't add comments). It probably will take a couple more months to complete beta testing and show up in Firefox 134-135.

[glfire]

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@jscher2000 wrote: First, I don't think there would be a way to switch the display setting this easily if there was a serious risk that switching between more or fewer checkboxes would erase your existing data.

I fully agree, also it is not clear what data could be lost (the user requested to provide clarifications on his claims has not replied ... maybe the history data that I am going to delete ? LOL )

[michellestubs03]

I miss the old options too! Having separate controls for cookies and site data was definitely useful. Hopefully they can find a way to simplify things while giving us back some granularity.