1357448 - Lower limits for Chrome history imports

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Migration, enhancement)

Description

[:Gijs (he/him)]

The data right now looks like this:

history jank: https://mzl.la/2o1EOd1
history total time: https://mzl.la/2o1Jm2U

It seems that:
- total times:
-- 95th percentile for history import total time is below:
--- 0.7 seconds for IE
--- 0.6 seconds for Edge
--- ~6 seconds for Chrome (I expect the discrepancy wrt IE/Edge is to do with the number of items we import)
- jank measured:
-- 95th percentile for history is below:
--- 0.3 seconds for IE
--- 0.5 seconds for Edge
--- 1.6 seconds for Chrome 

Especially in terms of total time for Chrome (and, by correlation, jank), it seems like it would benefit from us lowering these limits further.

The exact limits would probably be subject to a more detailed check like in bug 1340115 but certainly 180 days feels like a lot, and like we could limit to something more like 60-90 days.

Comment 1

[pwosj]

The exact limits would probably be subject to a more detailed check like in bug 1340115 but certainly 180 days feels like a lot, and like we could limit to something more like 60-90 days.

This is infuriating. Such decisions of people's years of browsing history are decided by intuition and "feels like a lot". Instead of fixing the inefficient history importer, you intend to throw away users' history just to present to them like a fast browser ?

This is tantamount to a lie. The user is not notified that their history was thrown away, they are not given preferences to change it in the import wizard, this is not mentioned in the documentation. They're lulled into a false sense of security that all of their data was imported only to discover that their top sites are broken, auto complete is broken.

To find this thing one has to:

• Check the oldest item in Chrome, and match it with the oldest item in Firefox.
• When found different, search docs, and find nothing,
• Search about it where countless rubbish blogs about import export take the top search ranks.
• Reach bug tracker to find 4 year old discussions about the topic.
• Guess that such an item will be in preferences. Nope. It's in about:config.
• "Accept the risk" and change the numbers to accommodate all history items.
• Import again, and wait for 6 minutes, and bear a slow as turtle UI.

I'm gonna propose a limit of 1300 history entries. Roughly 20% of people importing from Chrome have more history than that according to

Are the 20% people not your users ?

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to pwosj from comment #1)

their history was thrown away,

We don't throw anything away, we choose not to import everything. Note that the limit is still 180 days, and this bug was about lowering the limit further, but has never been "fixed".

their top sites are broken, auto complete is broken.

This doesn't really make much sense - are your top sites only sites you last visited more than half a year ago? That seems unlikely. It sounds like you're encountering a separate bug where the selection of the data we make is somehow wrong, and I would encourage you to file a separate report with more precise details.

• Import again, and wait for 6 minutes, and bear a slow as turtle UI.

How much history is this? 6 minutes sounds very excessive. A profile using Firefox's profiler ( https://profiler.firefox.com/ ) could help diagnose why it is so slow. Again, best off in a separate bug report.

Comment 3

[pwosj]

(In reply to :Gijs (he/him) from comment #2)

(In reply to pwosj from comment #1)

their history was thrown away,

We don't throw anything away, we choose not to import everything. Note that the limit is still 180 days, and this bug was about lowering the limit further, but has never been "fixed".

What do you think I'm going to do after I am let to believe that FF imported all of my chrome data? I'll delete it, the app, the appropriate folder in Library, the DMG, everything.

I believe the same thing happens when importing from Edge. An app which installs an autoupdater, needs root password to install, changes several file associations. I'll certainly clean everything done by Edge if I migrated from Edge to FF.

their top sites are broken, auto complete is broken.

This doesn't really make much sense - are your top sites only sites you last visited more than half a year ago? That seems unlikely. It sounds like you're encountering a separate bug where the selection of the data we make is somehow wrong, and I would encourage you to file a separate report with more precise details.

Before import, autocomplete was not working even though for the past two days I had been visiting the same sites. After import every frequently used website's autocomplete works. I'm not interested in filing any bug. You're swamped already.

• Import again, and wait for 6 minutes, and bear a slow as turtle UI.

How much history is this? 6 minutes sounds very excessive. A profile using Firefox's profiler ( https://profiler.firefox.com/ ) could help diagnose why it is so slow. Again, best off in a separate bug report.

360k items, dating back to about 1.5 years. Peak memory usage 1.9 GB. 75 MB Safari.db (I didn't tell you that for simplification, but I exported my Safari history to Chrome using https://github.com/Roman2K/hist_safari2chrome, and then from Chrome to FF ), 45 MB Chrome's History file, 52 MB FF's places.sqlite.

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Please be respectful, don't ping multiple persons unless there's strong reasons for it, and have a look at the Bugzilla Etiquette: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html

History is a volatile thing, most browsers (included Firefox) don't even have a backup of it, as such you should not expect it to be static data like bookmarks. It gets expired automatically by every browser too, so even if you expect it to live forever, it won't. Firefox is one of the browsers keeping it longer.
Chrome is expected to keep history for 90 days, indeed see their https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500239 if their history goes over that time, is just because the expiration system didn't remove it yet.

I'd strongly suggest to move the urls you care the most to bookmarks, regardless of the browser you use.

Comment 5

[pwosj]

A profile using Firefox's profiler ( https://profiler.firefox.com/ ) could help diagnose why it is so slow. Again, best off in a separate bug report.

I cannot redo the behavior. Re-importing (without deleting the old one) the history takes a minute. Maybe it was some combo of having chrome history tab open, or some tab in FF.

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [:mak] from comment #4)

Please be respectful, don't ping multiple persons unless there's strong reasons for it, and have a look at the Bugzilla Etiquette: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html

I could have either commented on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1340115 which is closed, and probably will not be seen by the developer working on this bug. Or commented on both places to notify everyone involved in this and the other report... which will create parallel discussions. Thus CC-ed everyone here.

It gets expired automatically by every browser too,

Safari offers the option "Remove": "Manually" to extend the history life. Default is one year IIRC.

Do you intend to document this behavior, or inform the user in the import wizard, or not lower the limit further, or improve the importer?

Comment 6

[Ania]

We intend to keep 180 days limit.