Firefox Forget-Button obliterates entire Session information

[StillBugged]

Today I used the "forget" button for the first time to forget a single website because I dismissed the privacy notice too quickly and couldn't find a setting option on the page itself. I know that I can also delete that pages cache in the preferences menu, but I noticed the forget button on the way there.

I also learned today, that this button deletes the entire session, even if you only want to delete the last 5 minutes. It informs about a "fresh" new window, but this information omits the important hint that not only a new session is started, but also all session backups are permanently deleted.
It is therefore not possible to restore windows or tabs, as you are used to doing after closing tabs. This applies to all tabs - even pinned ones and those that have existed for days, weeks, months or years.

The third thing I learned today is that this behaviour was already criticised ten years ago (!) and not just once, but nothing was changed:
https://support.mozilla.org/de/questions/1079100
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/y9fz6l/help_with_restoring_a_session/

The description of the forget button is therefore inaccurate and leads to data loss. Consequently, either the description of the button must be adapted by referencing to the deletion of all session information, or the resetting of the session must be removed (especcially when "forgetting" only the last 5 minutes...).

[TechHorse]

"The description of the forget button is therefore inaccurate and leads to data loss. Consequently, either the description of the button must be adapted by referencing to the deletion of all session information, or the resetting of the session must be removed (especcially when "forgetting" only the last 5 minutes...)."

StillBugged, the forget button's description says that it will close all windows and tabs, and that its actions cannot be undone.

In terms of "fixing" the forget button, the devil here is in the details. If the session was not affected then the tabs would stay onscreen. The site a user is trying to forget may be removed from the history list, but it is still there for anyone to see.

If instead only the last 5 minutes worth of tabs are to be forgotten, then again this is tricky. What qualifies as a recent tab?

If a site was first opened more than 5 minutes ago but was refreshed 1 minute ago, does it get forgotten?

If the answer is yes, then the person who had an email site open for days might complain if it gets forgotten because they refreshed within the last 5 minutes to check for new emails.

If the answer is no, then another person complains because they opened a site 15 minutes ago not realising that it might show undesirable content, but they refreshed it a few seconds ago to find themselves looking at something dodgy, and they wanted this now dodgy tab closed.

Or what if an older tab was accidentally closed but then reopened with ctrl+shift+T within the last 5 minutes?

Or how about an older site where a minute ago a new page within that site was opened? Such as a new Youtube video within a tab that has been on the Youtube site for a while? Again, some users would want the tab to close because of the most recent page, others would not because the site is older and it wasn't this site that was the problem.

If all or some tabs are closed but this action could be undone, or the current session is otherwise restorable, then yet another person complains after they "forgot" some currently opened sites only to have someone else restore the session and see what sites they had been on.

I suspect that the developers think it better to risk putting some users out by making them have to manually reopen unwantedly closed sites, rather than risk complaints by others because they were expecting a site to be expunged and leave no trace, but they later find that this wasn't the case.

Perhaps it could be emphasised more clearly what will happen if you use the forget button, but I can't see the developers attempting to change the function so that only tabs that meet complicated criteria will get closed and forgotten. Or "fixing" it so that forgotten tabs can be retrieved by someon else.

[StillBugged]

Hello TechHorse and thank you for your swift reply.
You are right. There is indeed a statement that this action cannot be undone.

However, I didn't see this as a reference to deleting previous sessions. Now, of course, that may or may not have been a mistake in my interpretation. In any case, I am not alone in this assessment, as you can see from the previous incidents that can be found online.

As far as the questions you described about dealing with old / refreshed tabs are concerned, I think that this has already been sufficiently resolved: Tabs are added to the history when they are opened and manually refreshed, as well as when they are refreshed through interaction. They are not added to the history when you restore them using CTRL+Shift+T or when the page reloads content. You can easily see this if you are surfing the web and have the history open at the same time.
Plus: If an already known page is called up, its entry is updated - it is not added anew.
I also doubt that the user is interested in how the background refresh of a tab works and therefore I do not assume that the user expects an old tab to be added to the history without interaction.

In my opinion, this makes it easy to find and delete all pages from the last X minutes, even if they have already been accessed in the past.

And there is already a second ‘forget’ button in Firefox, to ‘delete latest history’ found in the menu under 'history'. This button basically fulfils the same functions, with the difference that the specified time intervals are different and that no tabs are closed. Thus leading me to believe that the wheel was reinvented when developing the ‘forget button’ instead of extending and supplementing existing functionalities resulting in a worse user experience. But im digressing...

---

@TechHorse wrote:

Perhaps it could be emphasised more clearly what will happen if you use the forget button, but I can't see the developers attempting to change the function so that only tabs that meet complicated criteria will get closed and forgotten. Or "fixing" it so that forgotten tabs can be retrieved by someon else.

---

Yes, in the end I personally would be happy either way: For me it would be perfectly fine if it was just clearly pointed out that all sessions, the current and any previous ones, will be completely annihilated after pressing that button. 👍