I am a tab hoarder (and I suspect I'm not alone!). The new Forget feature isn't that useful for me because it will make me lose all of my open tabs and windows, not just the ones I want to forget from the last {five minutes,two hours,24 hours}. Actually I just tried out Forget for the first time now and didn't read the panel carefully enough, inadvertently losing all my open tabs. Can we make Forget work without needing to close all tabs and windows?

Philipp?

I thought this was more of a technical constraint rather than a design one?

(In reply to Stephen Horlander [:shorlander] from comment #2) > I thought this was more of a technical constraint rather than a design one? I don't suppose it is a technical limitation. It is already possible to go to the History sidebar and "Forget this site" while the site is still open. It is possible for that webpage to generate more history data while the page is open, so it's not fool-proof, but still possible.

(In reply to Stephen Horlander [:shorlander] from comment #2) > I thought this was more of a technical constraint rather than a design one? No; see also e.g. bug 1088184 which was wontfixed for design/aim-of-the-feature reasons, rather than technical ones. This is essentially the same, as far as I can tell. Of course, Jared makes a good point that, if we leave the tabs open, the tabs will likely create new history/cookie/... data that won't be deleted after you've used "forget", which would have surprising effects. Equally, it wouldn't really make sense to keep deleting things from tabs that were open since before you used "forget", because that would be counterintuitive for things like your always-open email tab (not everyone will have that pinned), and it would probably break the web (in that sites like to rely on cookies they set, and making them mysteriously vanish continuously while the site is open is likely to break shit, like e-commerce things and login state and...). So maybe that /is/ a technical reason? Depends how you see the design of the feature. :-)

Right, thanks. So we need to think more about how this would work, but it would probably be a better (less jarring) experience if we could be more selective with what we close. It does ramp up the complexity quite a bit though. Which is something we deliberately avoided for v1 to keep the scope narrow. We know the current "delete all the things!" won't be useful for everyone or for every use case.

I should also add that we tried to make it obvious (highlighting what would happen + red warning) that this would cause data loss. Maybe it's not obvious enough?

This is WONTFIX as working-as-designed -- Philipp wanted a simple button to click'n'clear everything (the original concept was as a "panic button"). We knew it wasn't useful for tab-hoarders, but we already have History --> Clear Recent History for those who want finer-grained control over their experience. Leaving open for the moment, though, since it's been common feedback and might be worth thinking about again.

(And as someone noted a few days ago for another purpose -- FHR(?) data showed that the vast majority (~95%) of users have < 5 tabs and few windows. So for most of our users, this isn't much of an issue.)

I understand the bug as a proposition at minimum not to delete the tabs/windows which were not created/changed within the forget time span. Even better would be restoring them to the last age before the begin of the "memory loss". As it is, the button is a great thing on a hotel computer one has to use to print the boarding cards. It's useless in an office when all I want to forget is the few minutes of checking my private stuff without losing the tabs I need to finish my work.

There's a concept over in bug 1088004 that has a checkbox next to the »close tabs« entry.

(In reply to Justin Dolske [:Dolske] from comment #7) > This is WONTFIX as working-as-designed -- Philipp wanted a simple button to > click'n'clear everything (the original concept was as a "panic button"). We > knew it wasn't useful for tab-hoarders, but we already have History --> > Clear Recent History for those who want finer-grained control over their > experience. What if somehow both features were merged? In the button dropdown you would somehow be presented with the Nuke em all option alongside the Clear Recent History option.

(In reply to Justin Dolske [:Dolske] from comment #8) > (And as someone noted a few days ago for another purpose -- FHR(?) data > showed that the vast majority (~95%) of users have < 5 tabs and few windows. > So for most of our users, this isn't much of an issue.) it's not problem of majority & design. http://i.imgur.com/I8G5wFj.png it shows totally wrong text & functional, and discordant with firefox announcement.

(In reply to hong620 from comment #14) > (In reply to Justin Dolske [:Dolske] from comment #8) > > (And as someone noted a few days ago for another purpose -- FHR(?) data > > showed that the vast majority (~95%) of users have < 5 tabs and few windows. > > So for most of our users, this isn't much of an issue.) > > it's not problem of majority & design. > > http://i.imgur.com/I8G5wFj.png > > it shows totally wrong text & functional, and discordant with firefox > announcement. I can't read the language that screenshot is in (Thai or Vietnamese, I guess?), but the English ("Close all tabs and windows") is clear, as far as I'm concerned. All the tabs and windows are closed, and we don't let you reopen them (because that would defeat the point). I don't think making the text there say "delete" would make any difference. If the language used in your screenshot is too ambiguous (which I can't judge), you can file a bug on the translation in question here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Mozilla%20Localizations . I really don't think this is a language issue - it's an issue of people's expectations and what the feature does. Dolske is right that this doesn't affect most of our users and is therefore not the most pressing issue with this feature (unlike, say, its performance, which likely affects many more users). As Philipp noted, there's an updated design that will hopefully help here, which is being discussed in bug 1088004.

This came up on SuMo today. The Forget button set to "5 minutes" cleared everything from the sessionstore-backups folder so it is not possible to recover information about "tabs I had open for weeks" that would have been listed in previous.jsonlz4 or the snapshots created during updates. Those files were not even created today, much less in the last 5 minutes, so I think they should not have been deleted. Is it better to file a separate bug for this aspect of the feature, rather than tie it in to the more general question of what to close and/or what UI to have for what to close?

(In reply to jscher2000 from comment #17) > This came up on SuMo today. The Forget button set to "5 minutes" cleared > everything from the sessionstore-backups folder [...] > > Is it better to file a separate bug for this aspect of the feature Yes. Off-hand I don't know why the sanitizer is removing sessionstore backups when it is time-limited.

(In reply to :Gijs (he/him) from comment #18) > (In reply to jscher2000 from comment #17) > > This came up on SuMo today. The Forget button set to "5 minutes" cleared > > everything from the sessionstore-backups folder [...] > > > > Is it better to file a separate bug for this aspect of the feature > > Yes. Off-hand I don't know why the sanitizer is removing sessionstore > backups when it is time-limited. Okay, I can't follow the code to a conclusion, but I filed my best shot here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1497731