1103223 - History entries disappear from their original location when visited

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[u328884]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0
Build ID: 20140315085348

Steps to reproduce:

1, In the FFox menu, click "History" (a "Library" window opens).
2, Pick an arbitrary history entry, but don't select it yet.
3, Record its date & time.
4, Now, double-click the history entry.


Actual results:

1, FFox focuses on the current FFox window.
2, The history entry's URL opens in the current tab (overpowering the tab's current URL).
3, Now, manually focus on the "Library" window.
4, Look for the date & time recorded in previous step 3 -- it's not there!
5, Observe that the original history entry has disappeared.



Expected results:

Creating a new history entry at the current date & time is logical, but removing the original history entry is illogical. It should be preserved, not deleted. Deleting history entries makes doing a series of related searches: search - open - close - search more..., unnecessarily difficult.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

What do you think should happen instead? Show the user incorrect data?

Comment 2

[YF (Yang)]

I guess he wanted the allows duplicate record or does not automatically update the panel. I also wanted, but I have no better ideas.

Comment 3

[u328884]

Reply to Gijs: The user is being shown incorrect data now. Let me cite an example:

Suppose history shows that I visited foo.com yesterday.
When I click on it today, history will show that I visited foo.com today, but the entry for yesterday is deleted.
It should show that I visited foo.com yesterday _&_ today.

Comment 4

[u328884]

This is important when I'm searching and clicking on a lot of history entries, especially history entries from yesterday and earlier. The history list changes as I'm working. Even worse, on each click, the focus is removed from the history window and is transferred to the newly opened location in a browser window. When I focus back to the history window, it is no longer focused on yesterday (or earlier days), but on today, so I have to go back to yesterday again and try to find my place, but that's difficult because yesterday's history entry is GONE!!!!!!!

Comment 5

[u328884]

Does it make sense to you that what I do today alters the history of what I did yesterday?

Comment 6

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I cannot reproduce what is reported in comment 3, for me the entry sticks in both yesterday and today,

I can explain what happens in comment 1 though. Our views show one entry per uri, just one, and those entries are sorted by last visited. So when you click on the entry its last visited changes and the entry gets moved to the top of the list (to keep it sorted).
the only view that doesn't show one entry per uri is By Last Visited in the history sydebar.
Notice you can select multiple history entries and act on those with a single command rather than going one by one.

I don't think we can change the way the views work until we write a completely new view that would be based on a search, for performance resons. We have about a million of visits to manage in an above than average history, and managing them through a treeview would be a big challenge.

Comment 7

[u328884]

Marco. Regarding your comment 6:

Where I live it's now 12:42 AM on Thursday. Just before midnight (Wednesday), I visited here:

http://www.cinemark.com/theatre-detail.aspx?node_id=1582

I just now went back into yesterday's history and clicked it. As a result, that link now appears in today's history of course, but it also appears in yesterday's history, but bearing today's date. That's not right. It should be in yesterday's history, but bearing yesterday's date.

Interesting: In your comment 6, you wrote "last visited". Huh? Is the utility a "History" (as it is marked) or is it some sort of funky "last visited" list? This seems like very poor design or maybe a thing that started life as "last visited" years ago but has migrated to become "history" today (but is not really history and is, instead, still "last visited").

So what is it: "last visited" or "History"?

Comment 8

[u328884]

Marco.

I just opened "History" for yesterday and clicked on all the entries there. Now "Today" and "Yesterday" are identical, including the dates.

...Yesterday appears to have never happened as far as FFox is concerned. Hahahahahahahaha....

Comment 9

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

The pages in a date container like yesterday are correctly shown if a visit exists for yesterday.

Though the "last visit" column in the right pane of the library is a general property of the page, that has nothing to do with previous visits, it's like "title".
It's not "the last visit in the currently selected timeframe".
So if you open "September" container for example, you might find a page that has a last visit set to today, that means the page has been visited today, but it clearly also had visits in September, or it wouldn't be there.
Reasons for that are various, mostly performance related. We'll improve the ui once we move to a new History view in future.

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

sound like duplicate of bug 892485

Comment 11

[YF (Yang)]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #10)
> sound like duplicate of bug 892485

They are not same, this bug is the history entries can't repeat or temporarily kept in the original position when clicked; the another bug is should not to follow the item when clicked.

Comment 12

[BMO Automation]

Per policy at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bug_Triage/Projects/Bug_Handling/Bug_Husbandry#Inactive_Bugs. If this bug is not an enhancement request or a bug not present in a supported release of Firefox, then it may be reopened.