1615206 - "Group Similar Messages" settings only impact defined list of warning message types

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(DevTools :: Console, defect, P3)

Description

[alex]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:73.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/73.0

Steps to reproduce:

I opened the Console Settings and removed the tick "Group Similar Messages".
But still, my logs are group. Even when "Show Timestamps" is enabled.

Example code:
setInterval(() => {
console.log("Message");
}, 250);

(Try here: https://jsfiddle.net/afr3Lz9s/)

Actual results:

"Message" (5)

Expected results:

"Message"
"Message"
"Message"
"Message"
"Message"

Comment 1

[Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe]]

Hello, thanks for the bug report.
The label of the setting is a bit misleading, we are only use that to group some warning messages (tracking protection warnings mainly).
It would be nice to disable the "repeat" mechanism for regular messages for sure.

Harald, what do you think?

Comment 2

[:Harald Kirschner :digitarald]

I guess we could treat those options under the same user-facing pref. WDYT, Nicolas?

Comment 3

[Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe]]

yes, that could be doable.
Having a pref for the "repeat" mechanism would mean it could be switched on and off, so we'd have to revisit our current implementation (we don't keep the message, only increment a counter).
That would help with another behavior people want (being able to expand a group of repeated messages, I guess to see the timestamps?)

Comment 4

[:Harald Kirschner :digitarald]

Seems like one decision would be if we can accept a trade-off that the checkbox is being applied to the existing logs or only future logs.

I am concerned that we keep a lot of optional data just in case users want to see it (like xhr/requests in Console), degrading both memory and performance.

Comment 5

[Marios Kaintatzis]

Issue still exists on Firefox 76.0

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:76.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/76.0

Comment 6

[Timwi]

Still a problem on Firefox 87.

Regarding the above questions, I can definitely confirm that as a user, I expect the option to control the grouping of all messages, not just warnings and especially not just some warnings of specific kinds.

Comment 9

[Adam Reece]

This still exists on FF 98.0.2.

I was thinking some of my asynchronous functionality wasn't working when the same response was being given, unknown to me was this feature being enabled by default, and broken.

This creates confusion and should not even be active by default.

Comment 11

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field for this bug is relatively low, S3. However, the bug has 3 duplicates.
:nchevobbe, could you consider increasing the bug severity?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 12

[Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe]]

still S3 IMO

Comment 13

[Chris]

Encountered this bug as well while tracing some console.log messages. I worked around it by adding a Math.random() call in the console.log arguments, as below.

console.log('initial string', Math.random());

Comment 14

[Alexandre]

The bug is still not fixed even after 3 years..
Still exists on FF 109.0.1.

Comment 15

[Filip Fryčák]

The issue still persist on Firefox 111.0 (MacOS Ventura). A fix would be great, this is quite confusing.

Comment 16

[ilyas]

Firefox Developer Edition 113.0b6 (64-bit), the bug still here.

In addition to above tip, i use console.log('something', Date.now()). It is a little bit convenient than Math.random() for me.

Also it may be human-like formatted :)

console.log(
	'something',
	new Date().toLocaleTimeString(
		'en-GB',
		{
			hour: '2-digit',
			minute: '2-digit',
			second: '2-digit',
			fractionalSecondDigits: 3,
		}
	)
)

Comment 18

[iannaconda_06]

i know it sounds insignificant, but it would help me to better overview the log messages while debugging the js code i written. so +1

Comment 19

[dsl101]

One of the most irritating things about this was the choice of where to put the repeat label. In blue, on the far right, near the blue source link. On a wide monitor, it's way out of eyeline and often missed. Even just moving it to the left hand side between the timestamp and the message would be a huge improvement.

Comment 20

[ross]

It would really be great if this got fixed finally. Or bare minimum move the number to the left side of the screen where the text output is. I very often use console output to debug stuff I'm working on. It's short messages. I'm looking at the left side of the screen for updates, not the complete opposite side to see if a very tiny number has ticked up.

Comment 21

[Anthony Hortin]

Still an issue in v140.0.4
Frustrating that this still hasn't been fixed 5 years later.
I want to see ALL my console messages, not just an incrementing number!

Comment 22

[Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe]]

Attachment: Bug 1615206 - [devtools] Make the "Group similar message" setting control repeating messages. r=#devtools

The existing setting was added to control grouping similar warning messages.
Due to the wording of the setting, users were also thinking it could control
repeated messages (the small badge/bubble we put next to messages when successibe
messages have the same text).
This patch renames the warning group pref into something that can drive both of
these, and we make the repeat mechanism check the value of the pref befor repeating.

Note that for repeated message, unlike warning groups, this doesn't "ungroup"
the messages, but that should be fine like this.

A node test case is added, as well as a mochitest (event though the test was already
checking repeated messages in a specific context, it's still nice to have
some basic actual coverage)

Comment 23

[Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe]]

I quickly created a patch for this with some test coverage, renaming the pref and re-using the existing setting to control the repeat mechanism

Comment 24

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/f70676c6450e
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/0f56ee13b4b5
[devtools] Make the "Group similar message" setting control repeating messages. r=devtools-reviewers,ochameau

Comment 25

[Cosmin Sabou [:CosminS]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/0f56ee13b4b5

Comment 26

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

Should we add this to the Fx143 relnotes? Feel free to add a nomination if yes.

Comment 27

[Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe]]

Release Note Request (optional, but appreciated)
[Why is this notable]: Dev feature allowing to disable grouping of similar successive logs in the console
[Affects Firefox for Android]: no
[Suggested wording]: Unchecking the Group Similar Messages setting will prevent successive similar messages to be grouped, all messages will be displayed in the output.
[Links (documentation, blog post, etc)]: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/web_console/ui_tour/index.html#toolbar

Comment 28

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

Added to the Fx143 relnotes, thanks.