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Why is site data not cleared on exit when I have "Keep Until: Firefox is closed" set?

  • 8 valiny
  • 2 manana an'ity olana ity
  • 25 views
  • Valiny farany nomen'i McCoy

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In "Cookies and Site Data" I have selected "Accept cookies and site data from web sites" and "Keep Until: Firefox is Closed".

When I close and reopen the browser, cookies are cleared for all sites I have visited (except for pinned tabs, but that's okay with me). Great! However, site data is not cleared. When I click "Manage Data.." I see a list of several sites, all showing no cookies but some number of KB of site data.

How can I make sure that site data is also cleared whenever I close Firefox?

I should note that I have no sites set as exceptions, other than ones set to block cookies altogether.

This is similar to an existing question (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1230363), but in that one the asker is having trouble with cookies, which are working fine for me. I tried applying the suggested fix from there (setting browser.sessionstore.privacy_level to 2) but it didn't make a difference.

In "Cookies and Site Data" I have selected "Accept cookies and site data from web sites" and "Keep Until: Firefox is Closed". When I close and reopen the browser, cookies are cleared for all sites I have visited (except for pinned tabs, but that's okay with me). Great! However, site data is not cleared. When I click "Manage Data.." I see a list of several sites, all showing no cookies but some number of KB of site data. How can I make sure that site data is also cleared whenever I close Firefox? I should note that I have no sites set as exceptions, other than ones set to block cookies altogether. This is similar to an existing question (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1230363), but in that one the asker is having trouble with cookies, which are working fine for me. I tried applying the suggested fix from there (setting browser.sessionstore.privacy_level to 2) but it didn't make a difference.

Novain'i MartinEden t@

Vahaolana nofidina

I found the solution I wanted, which I will document for others in the future:

  1. Go to Preferences > Privacy & Security
  2. In "History" choose "Use custom settings for history"
  3. Tick "Clear history when Firefox closes" and then click the adjacent "Settings" button.
  4. Make sure just these boxes are ticked: "Cookies" and "Offline web site data".
Hamaky an'ity valiny ity @ sehatra 👍 0

All Replies (8)

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Under 'Cookies and Site Data' click 'Clear Data' => check 'Cached Web Content' and click 'Clear'

That should do the trick .....

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I don't want to have to manually clear my data every time, if that's what you're suggesting. I want it to clear automatically every time I close the browser.

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My post was based on you mentioning the 'Cookies and Site Data' ......

If you want the cache cleared when you close Firefox, please take a look at this article and scroll down to the section 'Automatically clear the cache' :

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-clear-firefox-cache

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Thank you for your help, but I think you have misunderstood my question. I am not talking about cache data. I am talking about "site data", which the Firefox settings also refers to as "data from websites with persistent storage". I believe this corresponds to HTML 5 Local Storage, and is data that the website can read and write to, and which can therefore be used for advertising tracking.

In the "Cookies and Site Data" section, you can choose to only keep cookies and site data until Firefox is closed. However, in the button in the same section labelled "Manage data..." I can see that although cookies are cleared, site data remains. What I want is for Firefox to automatically clear this site data whenever I close the browser.

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No, I don't think that I misunderstood your question ....... (but feel free to prove me wrong).

Please, see this article :

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/storage

Also see jscher2000's post in this thread :

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1201893

And :

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/IndexedDB_API/Browser_storage_limits_and_eviction_criteria

Also :

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Storage_Inspector

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Vahaolana Nofidina

I found the solution I wanted, which I will document for others in the future:

  1. Go to Preferences > Privacy & Security
  2. In "History" choose "Use custom settings for history"
  3. Tick "Clear history when Firefox closes" and then click the adjacent "Settings" button.
  4. Make sure just these boxes are ticked: "Cookies" and "Offline web site data".

Novain'i MartinEden t@

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I gave you that solution in my second post - see the link :

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-clear-firefox-cache

But your reaction was that I misunderstood your question ......