557781 - Save and restore contents of textareas prior to sending (when back button doesn't work)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, enhancement, P5)

Description

[kriegste]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.3a4pre) Gecko/20100406 Minefield/3.7a4pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.3a4pre) Gecko/20100406 Minefield/3.7a4pre

If the internet connection dies or the website which presents a form that I just was about to send suddenly is offline, the contents of this form are often lost. A workaround would be to copy the text into the clipboard just before clicking "Send" to be absolutely sure nothing is lost. But that's no real solution.

It would be nice to have a feature that saves the contents of a form (or at least the textareas). Maybe even up to the point where I can use the navigation buttons and surf to another page within the same tab and even close the browser without losing the text I wrote.

What do you think?

Reproducible: Sometimes

Comment 1

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

This is probably a duplicate and I believe there was an extension for this function.

Comment 2

[kriegste]

Why as an extention? Autocomplete for other text input tags is possible by default, too. Contents are not being saved prior to sending, ok. But at least nothing is lost when the sending process fails. If this could be implemented for the big text fields- would be great!

Comment 3

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

Textarea Cache is likely the extension that you were thinking of Ria -> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5761

Comment 4

[Simon Bünzli]

This is likely a duplicate, however not of bug 530027.

Then again: Doesn't the Back button work in those cases to get back to the filled out form or the Reload button to resend the very same data? They already should.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> This is likely a duplicate, however not of bug 530027.

is there a better understanding of what bug this might be a duplicate of? 
or what component is involved? cache?

(agree, certainly not bug 530027)

> Then again: Doesn't the Back button work in those cases to get back to the
> filled out form or the Reload button to resend the very same data? They already
> should.

kriegste, does the back button work?  (I think we can assume it does not, else we wouldn't have this bug report)

I'm seeing something similar with bugzilla forms. text_input

also, ENH doesn't seem like the right categorization for dataloss.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

xref bug 530998

Comment 7

[kriegste]

No, it's those cases where the back button does not work. I had it a lot on https sites (web mail!). But it happens, as I said, intermittent. The connection/server/site dies, I click "back", FF tries to reload, nothing happens, of course. If I then press F5 and the sites comes back alive I'm sitting in front of a blank form.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

iirc, https adds a different dynamic 

can you still reproduce this problem?

Comment 9

[gasilskibe]

Doesn't the Back button work in those cases to get back to the filled out form or the Reload button to resend the very same data? They already should. mybkexperience

Comment 10

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Session restore mostly does this correctly these days. Where it doesn't, we need more concrete information about what site / exact STR produce an issue, in a new bug.