1446810 - Allow Firefox to save multiple URLs per bookmark and expose this functionality to webextensions

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Places, enhancement)

Description

[Hlsg]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0
Build ID: 20180315232954

Steps to reproduce:

Dead bookmarks due to URL changes even if more reliable URL alternates are very common out there. The Wordpress rel='shortlink' functionality comes to mind.


Actual results:

Poor webmastering leads to dead bookmarks with no 301 redirects. This is a reality that is unlikely to change.


Expected results:

If Firefox allowed multiple URLs(or just a supplementary alternate) per bookmark and exposed this functionality to webextensions, a lot of cool stuff could be done. I struggle to think of a use case for having more than the default URL and an alternate one, but there might be some. Feel free to chime in.

Said cool stuff webextensions could do include:
- saving a Wordpress site rel='shortlink' as an alternate to the default URL
- saving a Facebook profileid based URL as an alternate
- etc.

Firefox would then go through the links in order until it finds a working one or ask the user if to navigate to the alternate in case the main link is not working.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I don't see this as a possible improvement for the backend, a WebExtension could store alternate uris into its own storage, and use bookmark guids to assign them, then listen for loads and replace.
I also don't think the browser should become over complex to answer to every possible bad behaviors around, it would shortly be a mess to maintain. Plus there should be some sort of Web Standard on how a website can provide alternative uris. I know there is something for downloads (when you get a list of mirrors) but not for pages.
For these reasons, we won't consider this as a viable solution for now. If other browsers have anything like this, I'm happy to evaluate how they solved that problem.

On our side, we should probably think how to better manage bookmarks that start redirecting. That is bug 643554.

Comment 2

[Hlsg]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [::mak] from comment #1)
> I don't see this as a possible improvement for the backend, a WebExtension
> could store alternate uris into its own storage, and use bookmark guids to
> assign them, then listen for loads and replace.
> I also don't think the browser should become over complex to answer to every
> possible bad behaviors around, it would shortly be a mess to maintain. Plus
> there should be some sort of Web Standard on how a website can provide
> alternative uris. I know there is something for downloads (when you get a
> list of mirrors) but not for pages.
> For these reasons, we won't consider this as a viable solution for now. If
> other browsers have anything like this, I'm happy to evaluate how they
> solved that problem.
> 
> On our side, we should probably think how to better manage bookmarks that
> start redirecting. That is bug 643554.

I don't know of any plans for a standard regarding this, which is why I said that this should be left to webextensions and Firefox should only provide a means to store an alternate URL natively and expose that, as this should not be dependant on any specific WE. This is a problem almost as old as the web, which is not going away any time soon, and so I think that this could be a very nice differentiator for Firefox. Regardless, please just keep an open mind about this and maybe ask some fellow mozillians if and when you feel so inclined. Thank you!

Btw., I may be out of my depth here, but going one step further and defaulting the alternate URL saved to the original, pre-redirect one would go a long way towards solving bug 643554 and bug 68423.

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

We are mind open to new ideas, and this can likely be already implemented by a WebExt, as such I'd love to see such experiment.
On the other side, our resources are extremely constrained and we have overloaded with priorities, and as such I must be realistic in thinking this is unlikely to happen unless a new Web Standard is created or the above experimental WebExt gets hundreds thousands of users.