Hello,

sorry, but if one history is lost, it can not be returned. Thank you for you understand

Best regards, David-Walczysko Volunteer supporter

Thanks, David, for your reply - and for verifying my worst fears about Firefox design and usability.

I think it's terrible that Firefox doesn't warn users that restoring bookmarks will kill its history. It's bad enough that history size was truncated without warning to improve other facets of performance.

David Walczysko said

Hello, sorry, but if one history is lost, it can not be returned. Thank you for you understand Best regards, David-Walczysko Volunteer supporter

Sorry for your loss of data.

nick42 said

I think it's terrible that Firefox doesn't warn users that restoring bookmarks will kill its history. It's bad enough that history size was truncated without warning to improve other facets of performance.

Restoring a bookmarkbackup will restore bookmarks, but not browsing history which isn't backed up. An update shouldn't delete either and certainly not both, but that's a risk when "living on the cutting edge" of software development with the alpha level Nightly's.

Nightly used to be named Minefield for that reason - "stuff happens" occasionally.

the-edmeister said

An update shouldn't delete either and certainly not both, but that's a risk when "living on the cutting edge" of software development with the alpha level Nightly's. Nightly used to be named Minefield for that reason - "stuff happens" occasionally.

Absolutely. If you want the cutting edge, you have to accept the risk. I do feel that Mozilla needs to warn people about this. The download page for Nightly makes it seem like it's the latest and greatest at no risk to the user. So a big improvement would be to warn people - hey, this is cutting edge software, stuff can break.

But my big downer on Firefox is that it *doesn't* back up history, and, as a result of the decision of a minority of developers, it doesn't seem to take user history into much consideration. A few years ago Firefox quietly added the "feature" that old history would be deleted, without notice, because of "performance" issues. That's wrong. It's very bad to delete user data without warning the user. So I'm down about that, and I'm down about the fact that when you do restore bookmarks from backup, you lose all your history, and Firefox doesn't warn you before that happens. I think that's a serious, horrible error.

I do have regular backups so I've only lost a few days of history, but most people aren't going to be like me and they will probably lose a lot more. I feel bad about that and hope that firefox developers improve this part of the browser.

See also:

• bug 431274 - Provide a history backup

(please do not comment in bug reports
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html)

cor-el said

See also:

• bug 431274 - Provide a history backup

(please do not comment in bug reports
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html)

Yes!

Kudos to Marco Bonardo for bringing this up again!

I remember being distressed about this long ago, when a Firefox upgrade rendered the old browser-history tool inoperable. I think this shows that Firefox never really treated browsing history as very important. Ages ago, about 20 years ago, browser-history was an important addon that saved all your history in plaintext files. Then one point in the early oughts a change in Firefox made the tool inoperable.

Fixing bug 431274 by providing a solid history backup would be a huge plus for Firefox.

I marked it solved, but of course it's not really solved, we need to get bug 431274 fixed -- but once that happens Firefox will have some very basic and important functionality that it still, amazingly, lacks.

Until then maybe the only solution is frequent backups!

Hello,

is the issue still up to date?

Best regards, David-Walczysko Volunteer supporter