addendum: in the time it took to write the above (about three minutes) gmail logged out.. but yahoo and another site I had be tabbing to and clicking did NOT. I left yahoo fallow, and after about four minutes checked and "Lo!", I was logged out. The site I remained active in stayed logged in....

Also of note: that reply was posted after multiple Clears, it kept me logged in here, clearly. I had to close FF and reopen it to be logged out of here, and also out of sfgame.us to have that info cleared - I was able to stay in and using both sites (checks timestamps) for about twenty minutes after the first time I cleared history, and probably a dozen total clear attempts...

side note: the visual ghost menu reported in the original post ONLY occurs when invoking from the new upper right corner uber-menu. I re-enabled the menu bar, and invoking from there does not cause the ghost, although (thankfully) the functionality of Clear History, or lack thereof, seems to be the same....

Please reset your settings. Go to help-->Troubleshooting information -->reset history

Similar question was asked.Please check the thread https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/952163

Thank you for posting two replies, one pointing me at a thread and the other giving me exactly the advice that appears as the first reply in that thread.

As you can read in THE FIRST LINE of my post, I have already seen similar threads. I guess I needed to explicitly add that solutions there DID NOT WORK.

Thank you for assuming I am the sort of person who would read threads for similar problems, NOT try the solutions, and then post a new thread.

I assume you do not use a password manager, so the only way you could load a new page as a logged in user is if Firefox sent one or more cookies it was supposed to have cleared.

If you re-run the experiment, could you try:

(1) Load a relevant page on Yahoo then open the web console below it (Ctrl+Shift+k). You can use this to check the next page you load in the tab to see what cookies Firefox is sending.

(2) Clear cookies using the "Clear All History" method you are using, or just cookies, as you wish.

(3) Check whether any Yahoo cookies survived by clicking the padlock (or globe) icon in the address bar > More Information > (Security tab) > "View Cookies" button.

The list should be prefiltered to the current site and the list should be empty.

Any aberration here?

You can close this dialog.

(4) Click a link in the Yahoo page to navigate (in the same tab) to another page that requires being logged in.

If Yahoo responds as though you are still logged in, click the initial page request shown at the top of the list in the web console to show the request headers and sent cookies.

Did Firefox send any of the cookies that should have been cleared?

By the way, I see the same thing you describe on the new menu design: the History sub-menu doesn't completely cover the main menu. I think this is intentional, but I'm not a user interface designer, so I can't explain why one would want to set it up that way.

You are a bad evil man, and I mean that in the BEST of ways. I will likely be reading console dumps for the next ... day or two...

So, doing as you said, I log in to Yahoo, pop the console, and go to mail.

I clear cookies, I click on the instead of globe- is that because it is https? in any case, More Info... it says No, No, No in the Privacy & History, I view cookies, and there are none.

Next step, try to read an email. Yep, it appears. About 5 seconds later - maybe 12 to 15 seconds from when I did the clear command - while I am trying to see if cookies were set... the page auto-reloads and drops me to a "your session has expired" huzzah?!

This looks like some weird-ass propagation/race condition/timing problem. Before I had much more open, processes were likely slower, so I was keeping things alive with clicks 10-15 seconds apart somehow?!

I'm not sure it should ever behave that way (let me in even for a second, let alone a handful) but at least now I have an idea of wtf is going on, and I can chill for a minute or two after clearing and it will all act as expected. A workaround, not a fix, but I can deal with that - I'll ponder the security issues later, or let someone with more of a head for that sort of thing stare at it...

Sir, you absolutely rock!

Hmm, normally, even 10-15 seconds is too long for a new link to work when cookies are cleared. Maybe there is something happening on Yahoo that allows message previews without sending a full request, but the server invalidated the session when it got the full request?

Oh, bother. Lost a long reply to being logged out, dangit.

It does seem to be the full email, I can scroll all the way to the bottom.

One sample dump, from time I cleared the cookies until I saw it drop to the "expired" page. Guessing the "Internal Service Error" is actually where it decided I wasn't logged in.

GET https://ads.yahoo.com/get-user-id [HTTP/1.1 200 OK 2430ms] GET https://ads.yahoo.com/iframe3 [HTTP/1.1 200 OK 143ms] GET https://ad.doubleclick.net/adi/N6751.8578.YAHOOINC/B7939960.13;sz=300x600;dcopt=rcl;mtfIFPath=nofile;click=https://ads.yahoo.com/clk [HTTP/1.1 200 OK 518ms] Loading mixed (insecure) display content on a secure page "http://s3.grouponcdn.com/email/images/global_buttons/gradient_green_sm.gif"[Learn More] ca:167 GET https://us-mg5.mail.yahoo.com/neo/ult/ultLog [HTTP/1.1 502 Cannot find server. 74ms] GET http://www.groupon.com/analytic/track.gif [Mixed Content][HTTP/1.1 204 No Content 152ms] GET http://s3.grouponcdn.com/email/images/global_buttons/gradient_green_sm.gif [Mixed Content][HTTP/1.1 200 OK 32ms] GET https://sb.scorecardresearch.com/p [HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily 26ms] POST https://us-mg5.mail.yahoo.com/ws/mail/v2.0/jsonrpc [HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Service Error 160ms] GET https://us-mg5.mail.yahoo.com/neo/darla/php/fc.php [HTTP/1.1 502 Cannot find server. 62ms] GET https://sb.scorecardresearch.com/p2 [HTTP/1.1 200 OK 25ms] POST https://us-mg5.mail.yahoo.com/neo/ymstat [HTTP/1.1 502 Cannot find server. 178ms] POST https://us-mg5.mail.yahoo.com/ws/mail/v2.0/jsonrpc [HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error 88 377ms]

In any case, satisfied where I am. If I have tons of stuff open, there seems to be more lag before I get kicked. Odd but workable.

If I get into the weird state that caused me to clear cookies in the first place (seems to happen every few days) I will pop consoles, try all this again, and see if I see anything odder going on - or just much longer lags.

• hat tip*

Quote: I think this is intentional, but I'm not a user interface designer, so I can't explain why one would want to set it up that way.

I think that is is done that way so you can click in the main menu button area to close the history menu.
Other menus like the Help menu () behave in the same way and slide open.

it is also possible that the whole "reset history" thing that I trashed up top actually helped by reducing the lag from over a minute to 10-15 seconds. I didn't do extensive hammering after that change, just a fast look, saw I was still logged in, and marked that solution as FAIL.