Hello browsers, this is how clearing history should be done | Hacker News Reader

Hello browsers, this is how clearing history should be done

aentan.com

32 pointsaen25 comments

Apparently, Firefox is supposed to handle this for you without any action on your part:

http://blog.bonardo.net/2010/01/20/places-got-async-expirati...

According to that post, Firefox now detects your system specs and chooses an appropriate history expiration time. The post also details a preference that allows you to tweak Firefox to retain a specific number of history entries (rather than a certain age).

Yeah, but that doesn't actually reflect well on Firefox- since the Awesomebar, most computers not specced for development couldn't deal with more than a couple weeks of history without Firefox becoming worthlessly slow.

I rely almost exclusively on my history (that's why I can't use Chrome with its "less-than-awesome" url bar (compared to Firefox), but that's another story.)

Anyway, a much better way would be to clear by frequency of visit:

    . all
    . all but visited daily
    . all but visited weekly
    . all but visited monthly

or by date of last visit

    . all
    . all but visited during the last 24 hours
    . all but visited during the last week
    . all but visited during the last month

EDIT: like said below I never, ever, should have to even think about this, the user is not a garbage collector.

I ended up writing a query to delete duplicate history entries older than X days from my Firefox history to solve the slowness problem, I would imagine you could do something similar if you really wanted to remove all but visited during X.

No, we shouldn't have to remove our old history to speed up our browser. The UI as it is now, is good (like you said, for porn). The browsers should remove the old history by themselves when needed.

Better: store all history, but search (from Omnibar) only the recent NNNN items.

Indeed. The sensible thing is to use caching and avoid doing long-running operations in real-time. When the user presses a key the browser searches through a small cache of recent urls, if there is a delay before pressing the next key (say a second or so) then that triggers a more thorough search through the entire history.

It is incredibly annoying for the suggestion list to change after its first appearance. You may have been about to select a particular URL when it changes unexpectedly, and you end up navigating somewhere you hadn't intended.

Wait until there's a significant pause in typing before updating. If the user interact with the list (keys or mouse) then the browser should not modify it, until the user type again.

Then why store all history?

Presumably so you can elect to search history and be prepared to wait for results - unlike omnibar where you want instant typing.

> On Safari, you can only clear all your history.

This is wrong. On Safari, you can open Show All History and delete individual visits in your history (just select it and press delete). Or you can just go ahead and delete each date groupings, use search to delete only certain sites, etc. This is the same for Firefox, but I believe the ability to do this is not present in Chrome.

I found this to be much more powerful than Chrome's, since many times I want to delete browsing history for certain sites, not for certain period of time. (But Safari's UI allows me to delete both.)

> This is the same for Firefox

You can also delete Last <time period> <unit>s in Firefox.

Safari's history editing is really powerful. Perhaps the confusion arises because this functionality isn't obviously available from the History tab (you have to "Show All History" and edit from there).

Browsers already get rid of the oldest pages first. And since pages are refreshed when you visit them, that means the least-frequently visited pages will be forgotten first.

Firefox has a heuristic based on memory size to keep the history fast. http://blog.bonardo.net/2010/01/20/places-got-async-expirati... But you can go to about:config and change places.history.expiration.max_pages if you want to get rid of old pages faster (or slower).

A solution to this would be to not have the omnibar scan through the entire history when typing in it. Instead, if the history does become too big, it should only wade through frequently visited pages and pages visited in the past month (or whatever is the best tradeoff for speed).

Why is there a noticeable delay? With a proper index, even slow hardware should be able to deal with histories with millions of items in...

Yeah, Chrome's history options are weird. Why would I want to delete newer stuff first? It really should be the other way around--older stuff first. Or better yet, an option to delete individual items.

When I'm researching and clicking links left and right, I often reach a lot of dead ends. Because Google search is so good, I rarely bookmark the site once I find it, instead relying on the omnibar. Unfortunately, the omnibar always suggests the wrong entry in the history. I want to delete those bad entries so they don't show up in the omnibar.

>Or better yet, an option to delete individual items.

    Wrench menu -> History.
    Click on [Edit Items...]
    Select the ones you want to delete
    Click on [Remove Selected Items]

You want to delete recent history because you're covering your tracks (porn, "how to get a divorce", etc). Those history clearing options predate private-mode browsing.

They don't have expiry because the browser makers figure if it gets slow, it's a bug, and I'd bet most browser developers wind up trashing their profiles all the time anyway.

The fact that you need to worry about history at all for performance reasons is a bug. The fact that typing got slower over time is a regression -- Chrome was carefully designed to specifically not do this. I've notified the appropriate people.

"clear last x hours" has been replaced for me with Chrome's anonymous tab almost entirely.

Firefox already handles things the way the author wants. One should not assume Firefox functions like Chrome and probably should actually try?

Preferences => Privacy: Clear your recent history * last hour * last 2 hours * last 4 hours * today

And you can select if you want to clear cache, passwords, etc or everything of course.

This is not what the author wants. The article includes the sentence "Firefox lets you clear an hour, two hours, four hours and everything." which leads me to believe that they did actually try.

What is desired is clearing everything BEFORE X/Y/Z hours/days ago.

I would find it useful to be able to not include sites in the history. I don't need gMail, fb, picassa, sudoku and many others in history.

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