147423 - Session History corrupted

Status: VERIFIED WORKSFORME

(Core :: DOM: Navigation, defect)

Description

[Michel Joly de Lotbinière]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0rc3)
Gecko/20020523
BuildID:    2002052306

Assume you've browsed from a link on page A to page B, hence page A is the first
item in the the browser's back-button history menu. Now you click on a link on
page B for page C, but the browser responds by loading page A -- you need to use
the browser back-button to load page C, and the back-button history menu in fact
shows page C as the previous page. All of this can involve more than one WWW
site: once it has started, clicking any link to site C on page B will get you to
page A, from which you will have to back-track to site C.



Reproducible: Sometimes
Steps to Reproduce:
The maddening thing is finding a way to consistently reproduce this behaviour;
sometimes clicking on any URL in the History Sidebar seems to cancel the
erroneous behaviour, sometimes nothing but a browser restart will do that. I try
duplicating the same sequence of browsing after restarting the browser, and the
behaviour does not occur! So I can't even write a good bug report on it.


This behaviour is not reflected in the session history displayed in the history
sidebar or the history window.

Comment 1

[R.K.Aa.]

are you using a proxy?

Comment 2

[Michel Joly de Lotbinière]

Yes, I use the most recent version of "WebWasher" (webwasher.com). I
know recent versions of Mozilla allow all kinds of selective filtering
(e.g. I have set in preferences that all third-party cookies be blocked,
all other cookies accepted on request only, and that images be displayed from the
originating server and animated images shown once only), but I want to zap as
many web bugs & ad images as possible (Webwasher has a setting that preserves
the size attributes of frame, table and image markup it changes). I don't let it
do any JavaScript filtering, however.

Why would this filtering affect the session history behaviour of Mozilla? I mean
presumably Mozilla builds its forward/backward session history based on the
succession of WWW pages that it fetches, not the markup content of each page.

I was careful to try Mozilla without the proxy before filing this bug, and I did
experience this problem, but I only tried it a short time, and without starting
a new profile.

Anyway what I'll do is use Mozilla RC3 without the proxy under a new profile and
see if the problem returns. (My Mozilla is also chronically ill with the bug
cluster around 146619, a really serious regression.)

I'll add a note about success/failure of this work-around here once I feel more
certain about any results.

BTW, is a new profile really necessary for testing session history? What if I
simply deleted various files that are generated automatically? Exactly which ones?

Also, I have the default HTTP 1.1 protocol with persistent connections selected;
would falling back to the old HTTP 1.0 without persistent connections change
anything? (other than slowing down Mozilla)

Comment 3

[Michel Joly de Lotbinière]

I stopped using Webwasher.com's local filtering HTTP proxy but the problem still
occurs, so I don't think use of such proxies is part of the problem.

Meanwhile, someone has nailed down the problem much better than I: see bug #147176

All in all, session history & the history sidebar behaviour (#146619) in Mozilla
RC1-3 have been steadily going downhill to disaster. Very sad.

Comment 4

[Michel Joly de Lotbinière]

Status update: when Mozilla 1.0.1 is released, I'll double-check that the fix
for #128322 (of which this bug is probably a duplicate) actually works. I don't
have the time right now for the trunk releases.

Comment 5

[Daniel Wang]

Reporter, can you still reproduce this bug? With WebWasher on? And
with WebWasher off?

Comment 6

[Michael Lefevre]

no response from reporter for a couple of months, resolving WFM.

reporter: if you can still reproduce this bug with a recent build of mozilla,
please reopen this bug and comment with details. thanks.

Comment 7

[Michel Joly de Lotbinière]

I apologise to everyone for forgetting about this bug I reported; when Mozilla
1.1 (Release) came out I switched to that, and since the image & cookie blocking
seemed to work well and the present bug appeared resolved, I discontinued using
WebWasher--obviously I should have commented on all this at the time.

As for Mozilla 1.2x, I am playing chicken and waiting for the formal release;
the comments on the beta release's occasional serious regressions (e.g. #170143,
#173703) in features that I often use has cooled my enthusiasm for trying betas.
I realize this is a shameful lack of devotion to the project...

Comment 8

[Daniel Wang]

v