1322074 - 'Back' arrow often does not work, eg on Google searches and BBC News pages

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Jim Bennett]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
Build ID: 20161129173726

Steps to reproduce:

BBC News is a Bookmark in my Firefox. I go there often. Sometimes I try to go back and it won't, a second back goes to my home page file, then foreward re-enters the BBC web page
Google Search is a common thing I do. Sometimes I try to go back and it won't; a second back goes to the previous ^2 page, then forward re-enters the Google search.


Actual results:

As above. Back once does nothing in some web pages, including BBC News and Google Search. Back twice skips back two. Then forward once is equal to back once before.


Expected results:

Back should just go back. To the previous page: BBC News, or a Google search list result

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Can you reproduce this in a new Firefox profile? ( https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles )

Can you provide more detailed steps (how do you get to the google search results, or which BBC news page have you got bookmarked) and/or a screen recording of what happens?

I just tried to reproduce, and it seems to work fine for me. Loic, can you reproduce?

Comment 2

[Loic]

I'm not able to reproduce at the moment with my current profile (maybe hard to reproduce if the issue is not 100% reproducible), but I remember there was a similar issue in the past (bug 1150200). The user should test with a fresh profile indeed.

Comment 3

[Jim Bennett]

The problem is not predictably reproducible. I just tried two Firefox windows using BBC News and Wikipedia and all go-backs worked. 
Earlier I was on BBC News and I had to right-click and pull down history to go back. Clicking the back arrow merely replaced the same screen. 
Earlier I was on www.dpreview.com and had the same experience.
I most often notice the problem in places like BBC News and Wikipedia because I most often nagivate backward and forward on those sites.
It seems to be random. I am running Firefox latest version, NoScript, and some plugins. Java is turned off. Plugins are content decryption (2), acrobat, flash, and microsoft office (2).

Comment 4

[Emil Pasca [:emilpasca]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0

I have tested this issue on Windows 10 x64 with the latest Firefox release (50.1.0) and the latest Nightly (53.0a1-20161228030213) and haven't managed to reproduce it.
After going back and forward from BBC web page, Wikipedia and other web pages, I haven't encountered any issue.

Can you please retest this using the latest Firefox release and the latest Nightly build (https://nightly.mozilla.org/) and report back the results? When doing this, please use a new clean Firefox profile, maybe even safe mode, to eliminate custom settings as a possible cause (https://goo.gl/PNe90E).

Comment 5

[Emil Pasca [:emilpasca]]

Marking this as Resolved - Incomplete due to the lack of response from the reporter.

If anyone can still reproduce it on latest versions, feel free to reopen the issue and provide more information.