Places has been enabled on trunk/aurora

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rsx11m
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Places has been enabled on trunk/aurora

Post by rsx11m »

Just a heads-up notice that bug 920118, Make "visited link" coloring work in Thunderbird; enable and use Places for history landed today on comm-central. The idea is to keep track of links in messages (or the UI for that matter) which the user has clicked on, thus to have the same browsing history as in Firefox or SeaMonkey even if that link will be handled by an external application (the default browser).

Adding respective UI in the Privacy preferences and the "Clear recent history" dialog is bug 1020339, currently in the check-in queue. Please file new bugs blocking either of those as applicable for any issues that you see. There was also some discussion about other items (like form history) which may need to be exposed in the sanitize dialog as well if there is a sufficiently strong use case (feeds?).

Edit: To clarify: Places has been in Thunderbird for quite a while, it just now has been enabled by default. If you don't want it, switch the places.history.enabled preference back to false (which is what the new checkbox in the Privacy options does) and you have the state as before (i.e., no history recorded or used, even if you click on a link).
Last edited by rsx11m on July 21st, 2014, 7:16 am, edited 3 times in total.
Reason: will affect Earlybird with today's merge
rsx11m
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Re: Places has been enabled on trunk

Post by rsx11m »

The front end has now landed on trunk as well.
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Re: Places has been enabled on trunk

Post by rsx11m »

Interesting, apparently clearing the browsing history can also clear the entries in the download manager per bug 1037986 despite those code snippets not having been ported from the Firefox implementation. :-k

Edit: So, this has been inherited from Firefox's bug 465995, which was "solved" by tying the browser history and download history together in preferences and the clear recent history dialog.
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Re: Places has been enabled on trunk

Post by patrickjdempsey »

So the reports of TBird's death were indeed premature. ;)
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rsx11m
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Re: Places has been enabled on trunk

Post by rsx11m »

Rumors, all rumors... 8-)
Bozz
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Re: Places has been enabled on trunk

Post by Bozz »

Perhaps I missed this reading the bugs...

Will there be a pref setting to Clear history when Thunderbird closes as does Firefox?

Is there a keyboard shortcut to the Clear history dialog?
rsx11m
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Re: Places has been enabled on trunk

Post by rsx11m »

Pref: browser.visited_color

Clear on Exit: Since I'm using SeaMonkey as my browser I may not be up to date how Firefox looks like these days. There is "Clear History when Firefox closes" in the Private Data preferences, along with a dialog similar to the Private Data preferences in SeaMonkey. So, that might be another item that could be ported to some extent to Thunderbird. These things should be moved over piece by piece as considered appropriate, thus I'd recommend to open individual bugs for the features to port.

Keyboard shortcut: None indicated (it's Ctrl+Shift+Del in both Firefox and SeaMonkey).
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Re: Places has been enabled on trunk

Post by Bozz »

Perhaps a setting to clear history on close isn't really necessary with Thunderbird.

Is there a specific amount of history retained?
If that's the case, what pref determines that amount?
Will Thunderbird automatically start clearing history when a specific amount is reached?

I ask those questions because with the option to clear history on close with Firefox, I wasn't concerned about any excessive file size being generated.
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Re: Places has been enabled on trunk

Post by rsx11m »

Short answer due to the lack of further knowledge: Whatever the defaults for Places are.
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Re: Places has been enabled on trunk

Post by Bozz »

rsx11m wrote:Short answer due to the lack of further knowledge: Whatever the defaults for Places are.

So who can help with understanding how Places will work in Thunderbird in layman's terms? I wasn't concerned about Places until it was ported to Thunderbird without all of the options that Firefox has.
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Re: Places has been enabled on trunk

Post by rsx11m »

That was alta88's concern as well, possibly lots of things having been switched on, some of which are irrelevant but others may require additional action. On the bright side, we have 5 more cycles to sort things out and amend as necessary until this hits the next release branch with 38.0 ESR.
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Re: Places has been enabled on trunk

Post by rsx11m »

Since there seems to be more need for discussion and quite a bit of potential for follow-up bugs and patches in the wake of enabling places, I've opened bug 1038296 (tb-places) as meta bug. If you file a new bug report related to this, please make it block that meta bug. Thanks.
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Re: Places has been enabled on trunk

Post by rsx11m »

Bozz wrote:Is there a keyboard shortcut to the Clear history dialog?

Filed as bug 1038323.
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Re: Places has been enabled on trunk

Post by Bozz »

Thanks for generating the bug reports.

I thought I read somewhere that Places does some sort of maintenance after a certain amount of idle time. If that's the case then I would think that the time interval set to check for new messages would have an affect on idle time. Correct?

Maybe that's another aspect of Places that needs to be addressed.

Could this thread be stickyfied for the time being?
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Re: Places has been enabled on trunk

Post by rsx11m »

So stickified. As said, I don't know the internal working of the Places API. On the other hand, neither of those seem to be directly exposed in the Firefox UI either.

There is a documentation on MDN which may be a good starting point to dig further.
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