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Comment by forinti | Hacker News Reader

I once got a dressing down for clearing someone's browser history. Instead of using bookmarks, this person relied on the browser's history.

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I can't imagine clearing somebody's browser history as part of support work. Yikes.

At an old job, back in the 90s, a Customer demanded we fire one of our young techs because he cleared the "Recycle Bin" on a PC he was working on. The PC's assigned user had been storing important documents there because "you can always get them back".

That incident set the bar in my mind. Touch nothing beyond what is necessary to get the job done at your peril. Don't touch monitor settings, chair settings, lighting-- anything.

Edit: I've always used the vernacular "the PC assigned to (person)" rather than "(person)'s PC" because the computer belongs to the company, not the individual. As the tech it's important to remember it doesn't belong to you either.

I rely on my browsing history all the time. I don’t always know to bookmark a page the first I visit, oftentimes realizing its importance or utility much later.

I think that’s something you should ask before doing. Cache and cookies aren’t as important, but history is useful.

>>Cache and cookies aren’t as important, but history is useful.

If I were to clear my wife's cache and cookies, it would predictably lead to the biggest marital disturbance we had in our 10 years together.

Cache may not be that important (although I believe that nowadays clearing the cache also clears the local storage, so the same would apply) but there are sites that use long-lived cookies to deliver a personalized experience without needing to log in which you would irredeemably break by clearing the cookies.

clearing the cache should not clear localstorage. it should be treated like cookies.

in settings firefox has two categories for clearing data: 1: cookies and site data (which includes localstorage) and 2: cached web content

history is managed in a different section of the settings.

Cookies are more important to me than history.

Hmm yeah sorry without context it sounds like a bit of a dick move to be honest. You just assumed your way of working was somehow superior.

I have always relied on search and “last openend” for seeing what I was working on. Then some dude just deletes my winXP “last used” (or whatever it was) menu item stating: you should sort things in folders. Not amused I was.

even with sorting stuff in folders, "last opened" is a shortcut that saves several clicks and it helps me remember, which is important to get back into the zone.

same goes for browser history. it's not just where i have been, but also when. that gets lost with bookmarks. i probably won't miss really old history entries, but that's also an advantage. history eventually ages out. bookmarks never age out. i'd have to delete them manually. lastly at least originally visited links had a different color. bookmarked links don't do that.

but then, i'll just keep tabs open anyways.

I rely on open tabs. Firefox' search bar helpfully orders its results by priority: tab-search results first, browser history second, and search-engine results third. It makes a convenient workflow for re-discovering things I've already found before. I'm too lazy to close tabs, since new ones proliferate a lot faster than I can keep up. And if I dedicate time to clearing out old tabs, like a garbage-collection sweep, I waste far too much time because I get sidetracked by all the "read later" stuff I'd forgotten about.

When it goes up to several thousand open tabs, Firefox starts lagging, so I switch to a fresh browser profile.

Once, Hacker News IP-banned me because Firefox crashed, and the post-restart recovery tried to load several hundred HN tabs at the same time. Firefox no longer does this; restored tabs are loaded lazily, when they become foreground tabs.

when firefox started lagging because there were to many open tabs, i took advantage of that lazy loading feature and restarted the browser, causing all tabs except the active ones to remain unloaded.

now i installed an extension that suspends tabs that are not visited for a while. that keeps active tabs to a few dozen, so i never have to restart any more because of that.

apparently i have more than 3700 tabs (spread over a dozen windows, each window for a somewhat defined activity, which should make cleaning out a bit easier, since tabs are related, although i would still have to take some time off to clean through all off them).

> the post-restart recovery tried to load several hundred HN tabs at the same time. Firefox no longer does this; restored tabs are loaded lazily, when they become foreground tabs.

I wonder if this is the problem with Safari on Mac. There is some Critical Number of Tabs, beyond which it refuses to stop the beachball. I have to go into Safari on iOS to delete tabs from the Mac.

Now this I can understand—why would you do that?!

I think that is extremely and increasingly common, and even if it wasn't it's not like history was just added for fun, it has uses too.

If I have to clear my browser I am very sad until N (enter) brings me back here.

Yes I would be too, so I don't do that. But I think even more than the annoyance of everything lost I'd be mad at OP on principle for meddling? There's no context, but even if it was IT help desk my browser is too slow or something, seems like something I should be asked about first, given a chance to backup (or them do it for me and restore, and if that's not an option then it's just not an acceptable solution).

I assume everyone who has done "tech support" either professionally or as a hobby for family/friends has had the case where they "emptied the trash" only to find out that the person was storing important documents in it.

Well that is the reason for it to exist, vs. straight rm? I wouldn't do that to someone, at least not without asking, either.

But it’s still weird to put something that you still need into the trash can on your desktop computer.

Like, if someone at an office physically put a printed document into the trash can next to their desk, and then they started screaming the next day because the cleaning staff had emptied the trash can of “important documents”. Most people would agree that that would be an insane reaction.

So why people decide to intentionally put important documents in the trash can on the computer I don’t understand.

IMO the purpose of the trash can on the computer is to give you a chance to undo throwing it away, just like in real life. Instead of putting it straight into the shredder irl. But to expect things to stay in the trash for more than a little bit, that’s bonkers.

Only because you (should) expect (through experience/onboarding etc.) that that will happen. IMO it's a bit more like leaving a pile on your desk that looks like scrap, then being annoyed that someone cleared it without telling you or when you asked them to help with something else, and it actually wasn't scrap, or at least you hadn't yet determined that it certainly was.

And browser history doesn't even look like scrap, it's just a useful thing that exists and many people never clear it. Myself included, no reason to.

I once got chewed out by a finance director because we in IT had scheduled updates (and their associated restarts) to run on weekends. This guy was in the habit of creating important financial spreadsheets and then never saving them, just leaving them open all the time. So he came in one Monday and found all his work gone.

There was a rumor that when he was let go, the police had to drag him from the building kicking and screaming. That rumor was not true, but it was plausible.

Reboots not under your own control are horrible, just super annoying. For me my desktop is my "state". I hate that Windows (admins) do(es) that. Never reboot my machine, ask me to reboot it, I'll do it, when it suits me. Sure, give me a timer, that's fine. In fact that's how my company used to do it.

I really prefer Linux because of this, my updates, my way, my time, my conditions.

I think I stopped using bookmarks (other than 4 or 5 quick access buttons) some ten years ago, so I can relate.

Why would you do that? I'd be upset too!

I always try to avoid clearing peoples’ history if possible. E.g. use the Disable Cache option or delete individual cookies via Developer Tools instead.

In the rare case that I do try the nuclear option of clearing history, I always ask permission first.

I let Google keep track of mine and occasionally do a takeout so I can search back over a decade on all the devices I use.

One of the first browser extensions I wrote would archive the page you're looking at and create a navigable tree of your browsing history with a built in search. This was like 20 years ago. It's probably still somewhere, I don't even remember the name.

Bookmarks presume I'll know the future while history presumes I'll know the past. One of them is more knowable.

Clearing my history would be like wiping my home directory. If someone did it on my behalf I'd be shocked.

>relied on the browser's hitory

Hey now .. Its a perfectly cromulant way of going about tracking ones interests and information needs .. especially if you put the history directory in a git repo and practice good repo hygiene ..

Another good technique is to print-to-PDF, which is like boomarks on acid.

Of course, I'm implying intelligence where there is no evidence of any, in this case, just sayin' .. ;)

I disable history entirely and clear cookies and cache automatically when I close the browser.

If I want to save something, I copy/paste the URL into a text file.

And rightly so!

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