For me, the "forget" function is pointless and inconsistent.

[ajnzzwajdraj]

 It says "Time range to clear"—for example, 5 minutes—so I would expect my Firefox to look the way it did 5 minutes ago. I ran a test—wisely using a test profile, as the option "Close all tabs and windows" seemed suspicious—and sure enough, it deleted *all* my tabs. Please fix this inconsistency.

[TechHorse]

ajnzzwajdraj, I think the forget button is meant to be some sort of 'boss key' or 'panic' button.

If it did not close tabs then you might get situations where a person opened a site 10 minutes ago without knowing that it might show dodgy content, they then refresh the page to find themselves looking at something dodgy, and so hit the forget button but the dodgy content from 20 secongs ago remains.

Because they 'forgot the last 5 minutes' and that site was open before this.

[ajnzzwajdraj]

@TechHorse It is inconsistent nonetheless, because "all" and "recent" simply do not go together. According to the information in the image above, are all cookies and all history items removed, or—as stated—only the recent ones? The "emergency" or "panic" button only makes sense if *everything* is deleted; in that case, however, the word "recent" in the text is inaccurate. Personally, I would prefer that if "recent" is specified, then only the selected time frame should be cleared—rather than a mix of "everything" and "recent" items. The "forget" function should either be configurable or designed even more simply: "Clear EVERYTHING since the last time the browser was opened." And as for an "emergency" or "panic" button, just use "New private window."

[TechHorse]

@ajnzzwajdraj, in the panel it says "Proceeding will:" and then states what will happen in terms of recent history and cookies being removed, while all tabs and windows will be closed.

But yes they could probably make things even clearer by saying something more like
'Close all tabs and windows, and additionally remove any new history and cookies from the last...'
in order to emphasise what is being forgotten here, and what the time range is applying to.

But restructuring the panel to make the forget function's actions clearer aside, I am not sure what they could change in terms of the actual actions.

Deleting everything new from the last browser launch would still leave the potential situation where a refresh of a page that was opened in the previous session leads to something the user wants to forget, but it stays.

Unless if Firefox was to restore a snapshot of the contents of all open tabs at the previous exit and restore that. But if the site has some sort of live or self-updating section and the dodgy content was in the current cycle, then as soon as the restored site is live again the content could reappear.

Also, people might have had the browser open for hours or days, and they might not want the research that they conducted a few hours ago lost from their history records because the option to quickly remove just the last 5 minutes has gone.

As for configuring the function, if people want more precision over what is being deleted beyond specifying a time range for some types of data, they can use the "Clear Recent History" item from the History menu (Ctrl+Shift+Delete is the hotkey for Windows and others). That gives additional checkboxes for individual types of data.

I think that Forget is meant to be a sort of quickfire version of this, for people who just want to quickly make things go away without having to put a lot of thought or time into it.

But again, if some users feel that the panel is unclear or ambiguous, then changing the wording may help here.