Overview

Sprint lead: adw
Sprinters: faaborg, johnath
Sprint QA: marcia

Description

Instead of offering only hard 1/2/4 hour segments, provide a way to modify the specific range of your history to be obliterated, showing dates and visited sites.

Status

Landed on trunk and 1.9.1. However, scope was reduced dramatically to make 3.5b4. Ability to define specific time range was removed. See the depends and blocking lists at bug 480169 for all the fall-out bugs.

Will re-evaluate this sprint at a later date. bug 490679 is tracking follow-up. Tentatively plan to present user with a view of recently visited sites (clumped together, instead of individual pages), possibly incorporating user's Places usage to display recent history by access patterns (e.g., started a recent "session" by typing a site into the address bar or visiting a bookmark).

Goals / Use Cases

• Goal: add a time selection widget to both provide visual feedback and confirmation of what is going to be removed, and to give the user a finer grained level of control for selecting a specific range.
  • Use case: guess that you want to clear about two hours, see that this looks right (or drag the range a little, since it was really more like two hours and 15 min), and then click clear.
• Goal: provide more warning before the user clears all of their history
  • Use case: user selects "everything" by accident, and they subsequently realize that they don't want to nuke all the history in their profile thanks to the warning interface we have designed.

Non Goals

• The largest non-goal is to directly cater to the needs of users who expect the dialog to behave in the same way as the previous version. For instance, if the user regularly opens this dialog to clear all of your active logins, this now a more complex operation since they need to now expand the details are, and also scroll down to get to active log-ins.
• Another non-goal is for this dialog to enable a full reset of Firefox (including personal data level things like passwords, bookmarks, new dictionary entries, add-ons and and setting). A total Firefox reset is best handled with some type of higher level profile manager UI, and probably not from inside of the application itself.

Design

Bugs

• Clear recent history refresh (sprint)
• See the depends and blocking lists at the above bug for fall-out of the patch's landing
• Use consistent terminology for history and data sub-components in our UI
• Sprint follow-up being tracked at bug 490679