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How do I Clear browsing history in Mozilla Thunderbird using SA

  • 27 October 2012
  • 21 replies
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Used to have window washer which was great and that product is no longer going to be supported so went to Secure Anywhere which does not clean the browsing history.  Wish SA would just do it!!
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Best answer by MikeR 28 October 2012, 20:47

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Sorry, Webroot FIREFOX BROWSER  is what I manea to say.... sorry!!
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Hello CAP137 and Welcome to the Webroot Community Forums.
 
The system cleaning feature is in the Complete version only. http://www.webroot.com/En_US/consumer-compare.html
 
https://detail.webrootanywhere.com/agenthelp.asp?n=Running_a_system_cleanup
 
TH
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Or you can do manually in Firefox.
 
HTH,
 
TH
 


I have Secure Anywhere Complete.  Need some help with this because it doesn't perform the cleaning.  Window Washer cleaned more things than this does.
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Just go through the cleaner settings and adjust to the way you want it https://detail.webrootanywhere.com/agenthelp.asp?n=Running_a_system_cleanup
 
HTH,
 
TH
Userlevel 7
Hey CAP137,
 
I liked some of the features on Window Washer as well. If you create an idea in our Ideas Exchange, I would give it a kudos and we would have a starting point for getting such features added to System Cleaner for other browsers in addition to Internet Explorer.
Mike,
Great idea.  Just did it!  Thanks!
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Thank you for your great input! 😉
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Just to add there are some settings already for other browsers but to the extent of the cleaning I don't know?
 
TH
 


Hmmmm... don't have all those options that you show on your screen shot... only 9 of them. 
Do not have  either of the Adobe's, the Clonecd, neither of the two opera choices, no quick time or the two Sun Java options or the windows direct input.
 
But do have two CyberlinkPower2go files and a windows WBEM option.
 
Am starting to wonder if I really have the COMPLETE that I paid for or some lesser version???
Userlevel 7
You have SecureAnywhere Complete. System Cleaner is only offered on SecureAnywehre Complete.
 
TripleHelix has more options because he has more programs and browsers installed on his system. He was just showing that you can clear the cache files on Mozilla Firefox if you wish.
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But I don't have Chrome or Adobe Acrobat Pro just Adobe Reader installed maybe he needs to do a clean reinstall what do you think Mike?
 
Daniel
 
 
OK got it ...... sorry for the confusion.  Believe i'll wait to see if more features get incorporated in follow on editions.  Thanks for all your assistance.
 
I have version 8.0.2.27
 
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Yes that's the latest version and you have Firefox and it's doesn't show in the App list?
 
TH
Yes it absolutely does... it just doesn't clean the history/browsing items like Window Washer did.
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Glad you submitted a new idea for this, I think it will become popular. 😉
Great!
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The history information in Firefox is a tricky thing.  It's stored in an SQLite database that is locked while Firefox is running.  SQLite handling code alone is relatively large.  Literally just the library that helps deal with the database is bigger than the entirety of SecureAnywhere itself.  So the "clean" way to clean everything is to delete that database file.  BUT...  Unlike in Internet Explorer, this can only be done when Firefox is not running.
 
So it becomes a tradeoff.  A huge amount of SQLite handling code to clean it selectively, or delete the file, but only when Firefox is not running.  So we'd have to also make sure that the user shuts Firefox down.  Alternatively, there are features built in to Firefox that will do things like clean it automatically when you shut Firefox down or delete it Right Now, as well as features that will not even store it in the database to begin with.  So is it better to replicate functionality that already exists in Firefox but has extra steps that need to be taken, or to let Firefox do the best job inside itself?
 
As more programs become black boxes and tell other things to not touch them, cleanup definitely becomes more complicated.
Interesting because Webroot Window Washer used to do it just fine.  It couldn't clean IE if it was running but cleaned Firefox while running.
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Yup.  I was involved in the Window Washer portion back when I was an Escalation Engineer.  Firefox changed the version of SQLite functionality they were using and WW was using an old library to do the work.  I was able to locate the problem and direct developers to the new library code to remedy the issue. Unfortunately, the Mozilla SQLite3 library for handling that is bigger than all of WSA altogether and we do not trust external libraries, since they can be compromised.  That means that the code would need to be built into WSA directly and would either make it more than twice as big or need to be developed from scratch.  The latter is on our list, but is non-trivial.
 
However...
 
The downside is that it would "work", but Firefox itself could "un-work" it, so to speak.  Window Washer would delete all of the rows in the Database and run a compact followed by a slack wash just of the previously-occupied sectors.  This means the database would be pretty effectively cleared out.  Unfortunately, then it was not unusual for Firefox itself, if it was running, to replace the deleted data in a deleted status.  So the information would not show up in Firefox, since the Database said it was deleted, but forensic evaluation of the Database file would still show some or all of the data.  The only way to enforce unrecoverable deletion would be to ensure that Firefox is not running at the time the cleanup occurred, which is why Window Washer recommended shutting down Firefox (and IE) in advance.  Many people didn't notice that though.
 
By comparison, when all history is deleted through Firefox directly, it performs a truncate (faster way of deleting all the rows but doesn't show details or allow some to be skipped), then packs the database.  But Firefox itself knows that the data is supposed to be Very, Very Gone and doesn't put in forensically-recoverable versions of the data that it remembers.

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