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Mozilla Personal

Finer-grained Controls for Clearing Private Data

I semi-recently did some work to add a nice new feature for Firefox 3.1. The feature is “Forget About This Site,” and is a nice addition to our Clear Private Data and Private Browsing features. Any time you view a history entry (in the history sidebar or in the Library) you get a handy context menu item:
Forget About This Site Screenshot

That’s right! You can now selectively clear data from a domain (and all of it’s sub domains) with two clicks of the mouse! This tries to clear everything we know about a site, with the exception of bookmarks. There are still a number of issues pending with this to make it even more powerful (help wanted!), but as it stands, it’s pretty nice. I am, of course, biased.

All this work made it in for Firefox 3.1 beta 2, but I’ve been lazy and am just now getting to it.

By Shawn Wilsher

The man behind the site.

9 replies on “Finer-grained Controls for Clearing Private Data”

This is a really nice feature, thanks!

It would be nice if you could run it in a background thread, so as not to lock the GUI while clearing.

I personally think there is some confusion between the wording of the two. At first glance, I thought it said “Forget about this Page.” I ended up asking myself what was the difference between the two. I think to amplify the difference between forgetting a PAGE and a SITE the first string should be changed to “Forget about this page” from “Delete this page”.

This just resurrects a feature that already Mozilla 1.7 had (and SeaMonkey 2.0 until the recent switch to Places history). The menu entries there were more clearly named, because it specified the actual pages/URLs that are affected. (Granted, that caused some overlong menus once in a while.)

But yes, great to see that it’s back!

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