History is not Expiring as it should (17.02-7450)...
Dear TenFourFox: I am having a problem with TenFourFox 7450 in that it will not allow history to expire as it should. I have set the 'browser.history_expire_days' & 'browser.history_expire_days_mirror' to "1" so that the history should expire after one day, but it is ignoring these and continues to keep history in the 'Last 7 Days' tab.
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Support Staff 1 Posted by Chris (chtrusch... on 15 Mar, 2013 09:46 PM
Hello Adam, as far as I know, browser.history_expire… doesn't do anything anymore since TFF/Firefox 4. (Or does this work for you in recent Firefox versions on Windows/Intel Mac? Then I stand corrected.) There is no way to set a number of days or sites I'm aware of. You can delete old history manually, or check Preferences>Privacy>"Clear History when TenFourFox closes".
Personally, I don't understand why Mozilla developers removed the function to automatically delete old history, but there's lots of stuff in the UI/history/cache/bookmarks management that used to be perfect in Firefox 1/2 and Seamonkey 1, then got "improved", that I can only shake my head about.
2 Posted by Adam Albrec on 15 Mar, 2013 09:54 PM
The only reason I even enable history is because nobody there has EVER cared about making crash restore work properly. This kind of lack of attention to the little things is why Omniweb is still the choice for PPC Macs.
Support Staff 3 Posted by Cameron Kaiser on 15 Mar, 2013 10:37 PM
Adam, let me make Chris' post explicit. Firefox doesn't support timeframes for expiring history anymore, and hasn't since Fx 4, and generally what Firefox doesn't support we don't support. (I've backported certain minor features from older Firefox versions to TenFourFox, but that's only for generally essential features, and only then if it's maintainable.)
As far as crash restore, it definitely works fine, or it would be impossible for me to properly debug the browser. If you have an instance where TenFourFox differs in behaviour from Firefox on a tier-1 platform, I would be happy to investigate it, but other bugs need to be filed against Mozilla.
4 Posted by Adam Albrec on 15 Mar, 2013 10:48 PM
I am sorry, I have done more research over the last hour and it would appear that a number of mainstream FF users are upset about this. The only reason I had mentioned it in connection with TFF, is that when I used to post results to the blog, I remember making comments two times about problems with the crash restore and both times it was replied that you all were dealing with more important issues. It appears now that it had never been a problem with TFF as much as an arbitrary decision by Mozilla.
I don't have massive room on this machine and between TFF and XBMC updates I have to clear about 100MB a month off of it.
Very Sorry to you and your helper for jumping the gun and/or being rude. I do appreciate very much the efforts you have all gone to, and have actually budgeted this summer to donate money to you all and a few other OS developers that keep my machine running.
Adam
P.S. You totally can't blame people for loving OmniWeb though, can you - it is pretty bad ass!
Support Staff 5 Posted by Cameron Kaiser on 15 Mar, 2013 11:13 PM
Unfortunately, Mozilla certainly did make some fairly difficult to understand decisions, particularly between 3.6 and 4, but also to a lesser extent along the way. Part of this churn is why we decided to stick with an ESR build -- case in point was Growl support, which was in 17, it was removed in 18, complaints came in saying it was removed prematurely for 10.6/7 users, and it was restored in 19. Again, in some cases I've reversed these decisions, but this is one that would be very hard to maintain due to the multiple modules involved in history. Frustrating though those decisions are, they're Mozilla's to explain. And yes, removing the history timeframe feature was very unpopular.
I don't accept donations as a matter of policy, but thanks for the kind word just the same. While I certainly like OmniWeb when I need to use a WebKit browser on 10.4, I suspect that it won't be getting updated very much anymore, let alone be supported for another release on 10.4 or PowerPC.
As far as crash restore, again, if you can demonstrate a difference in 17 or 19 please let me know. There shouldn't be one, and crashes generally do restore tabs and windows (or pop up the "Well, this is embarrassing." screen if the crash is repeated).