1500108 - Remove the history.onlyTyped preference and behavior from the Address Bar

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement, P1)

Description

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

browser.urlbar.history.onlyTyped is an hidden pref that complicates our filtering code and is bogus, because our typed implementation is a mess (Bug 1461844, Bug 1330343).
To simplify porting the filtering behaviors to the Quantum Bar, for now we want to remove this not-so-useful behavior. We're also removing the typed restriction char in bug 1499743.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Attachment: Bug 1500108 - Remove the history.onlyTyped preference and behavior from the Address Bar. r?adw!

Comment 2

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/27a7c02c5fdf
Remove the history.onlyTyped preference and behavior from the Address Bar. r=adw

Comment 3

[Stefan Hindli [:stefan_hindli]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/27a7c02c5fdf

Comment 4

[Rick Puckett]

I would like to comment that this behavior is not "not-so-useful". It allows filtering extraneous visited links when typing in the address bar.

For example, if I type slashdot.org and, subsequently visit several pages on that site, then want to type/visit slashdot again, I don't really want to see/have all the sub-pages listed as options, I want to navigate to the main page. Similarly for news sites, like the NY Times, etc. Why would I want to see old news links in the drop-down?

Just my $0.02, but I found the behavior very useful for filtering out old URLs and reducing the noise in the drop-down list.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

unvisited links will begin losing score in days, and soon disappear. since the behavior self-adapts, there's no point in the user doing manual strong filtering.

Comment 6

[honsch]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [::mak] from comment #5)

unvisited links will begin losing score in days, and soon disappear. since the behavior self-adapts, there's no point in the user doing manual strong filtering.
This is a profound misunderstanding of how useful the "onlyTypes" feature is.
You're saying "links will soon disappear", except that the links will be replace with new ones every time you visit the parent site.
You have removed the second most useful part of the URL bar, second only to typing in it.
The correct action was to fix the typed implementation rather than throw away a valuable feature.
What investigation did you do beforehand to gauge the use of this feature before deciding on removing it?

Comment 7

[Rick Puckett]

(In reply to honsch from comment #6)

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [::mak] from comment #5)

unvisited links will begin losing score in days, and soon disappear. since the behavior self-adapts, there's no point in the user doing manual strong filtering.

This is a profound misunderstanding of how useful the "onlyTypes" feature is.
You're saying "links will soon disappear", except that the links will be replace with new ones every time you visit the parent site.
You have removed the second most useful part of the URL bar, second only to typing in it.
The correct action was to fix the typed implementation rather than throw away a valuable feature.
What investigation did you do beforehand to gauge the use of this feature before deciding on removing it?

I agree with honsch. Removing this behavior greatly decreases the urlbar user experience and the user's options for controlling it.

Comment 8

[Ralph]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [:mak] from comment #5)

unvisited links will begin losing score in days, and soon disappear. since the behavior self-adapts, there's no point in the user doing manual strong filtering.

It's funny how disabling "not so useful" features in Firefox has pushed me to use Chrome so much that when I come back to Fx I quickly get frustrated again because it's "misbehaving", only to find out later that it was decided by some random guy –a reason why I don't bother checking about Fx as much.

I honesty think Chrome has much to thank you for, Marco et team; you are great at promoting... well, any other browser, really.