172305 - Back and forward buttons pick up a truncated URL from session history

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: Navigation, defect)

Description

[Ian Neal]

Currently using BuildID 2002100108 on WinXPSP1
I've noticed recently when navigating through pages sometimes a page isn't
correctly registered in the session history so if you click on the back button
you get a pop message saying something like
file /talkback/read.php?f=4&i=4244&t=4239 not found

If you use the drop down from the back button and select the page before the
problem page and then click forward you get the same message.

It does not happen very often and if you go back to the page before the problem
page and then click on the link you used, the page usually gets registered
correctly in the session history.

I'll work on getting some reproducable steps and the exact text in the popup box.

Comment 1

[Ian Neal]

I still can't get a list of reproducable steps but it will happen when clicking
on back, usually in mozillazine or bugzilla.
The error message says:
The file /buglist.cgi?bug...... cannot be found. Please check the location and
try again.
For some reason it's forgotten to store the http://bugzilla.mozilla.org part of
the URL thus is looking for /buglist.cgi?bug.... on the filesystem so of course
cannot find it.
It doesn't seem to be the history session as clicking on the link in the history
sidebar works, it only seems to affect the back and forward buttons. I'll tweak
the summary to reflect this, orginally summary was "Pages incorrectly registered
in session history"
I've seen this happen in BuildID 2002091508 on Win2KSP2 as well

Comment 2

[Radha on family leave (not reading bugmail)]

Marking future, since we don't have a clear reproducible case yet.

Comment 3

[Ian Neal]

Attachment: Example of error message when trying to go back to an item in the history that has got cropped

This is using BuildID 2003122208 on WinXP SP1

Comment 4

[Ian Neal]

The entry actually shows up correctly under Go, History (Ctrl+H) and if you
select open on that it works fine, just not from the forward and backward buttons.

Comment 5

[Ian Neal]

Workaround is to use Go, History, so changing severity back to normal.

Comment 6

[Ian Neal]

I've done some poking around when this error occurs. For example if it is
occuring when I try and use the back button and I look at
sessionHistory.getEntryAtIndex(index - 1, false) the entry it returns seems to
be properly constructed. Do the forward and back buttons cache the session
history in anyway?
Reassigning to owner of selected component

Comment 7

[Ian Neal]

Adding jag to cc as I've been told he knows the session history code.
If there's anything more I can poke around with next time it happens let me know.

Comment 8

[Jeff Walden [:Waldo]]

Removing MozillaZine URL as it's really not relevant because it's not cleanly
reproduceable there.  Here's a link to a post there with a list of occurrences,
tho, that may or may not help:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=40732

Comment 9

[Mike Gebis]

I see this (or a similar problem) all the time when navigating on
"http://www.fark.com/"; in this case, the dialog says "File / cannot be found"  

Of course, I just tried reproducing it about 200 times just now and...no dice. 
But fark.com seems to be the most troublesome of the sites I visit.

I'm using "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7a)
Gecko/20040120 Firebird/0.8.0+" here at home, but I've seen the problem from
Firebirds from the last month.  It also doesn't track with machine or network; I
see the same problem on my work computer with different firebird builds, too.

This might not be the same bug, though.  When I see the problem, selecting the
same page from a bookmark and/or typing it back into the URLbar DO NOT fix the
problem; the page still refuses to reload.  It would seem to me that the problem
 I'm seeing is triggered by going back and forth in the history, but once I get
it, I'm stuck and can't seem to get back to the troublesome page. (Although if I
type in a different but equivalent URL like "http://www.fark.com/index.html"
into the URLbar instead, that works.)

Bleh.  Rereading my comment, I'm not sure if I added any useful information at
all.  If there's some experiment that a lowly user like myself could do to
collect more information, let me know and I'll do it the next time the problem
shows up.

Comment 10

[Stephen Pride]

I have been seeing this problem a lot since upgrading from Mozilla 1.4 to 1.6. 
I have an account on Yahoo! (http://my.yahoo.com), and it occurs the most
whenever I (1) start at the front page, (2) read a news/sports story or click on
a company stock ticker symbol, (3) go into the message board for the same, (4)
use the Back button to get back to my front page.  Its when I click on the Back
button in step #4 in particular that the problem occurs.  It is intermittent,
but usually happens at a frequency of about 1-2x out of 10, which becomes
annoying.  Using 1.4, I don't believe I ever had this problem.

Comment 11

[Jeff Walden [:Waldo]]

Is this a dupe of bug 123662?  I'm unsure, so I'll let someone else mark it as 
one if this bug is a duplicate.

Comment 12

[Ian Neal]

bug 123662 was initially to do with when entering URLs into the URL bar, though
some of the bugs duped against it since are about this particular problem (e.g.
bug 229685 and bug 168061). The question is, are they one and the same problem
or different problems? For example the problem from comment#9 of this bug is
probably bug 123662 whereas comment#10 is this bug's problem.

Comment 13

[Ian Neal]

Just got it again using buildID 2004020608 on WinXP SP1. Viewing the history and
selecting copy link location and then looking at the paste buffer shows the
correct URL. Is there anything else I can do to get more information when this
happens that will help diagnose this problem?

Comment 14

[Jeff Walden [:Waldo]]

*** Bug 234272 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 15

[Andrew Hagen]

I'm not seeing this on 1.7 RC2, Win 98.

Please download 1.7 RC2 and install it. Does the problem still occur with the
new version?

Comment 16

[Jeff Walden [:Waldo]]

(In reply to comment #15)
> I'm not seeing this on 1.7 RC2, Win 98.
> 
> Please download 1.7 RC2 and install it. Does the problem still occur with the
> new version?

This looks very much like it was intended for another bug.  If it was, simply
post it there and ignore here -- we'll understand and you'll save us the
bugspam.  If it truly was for here, then an explanation is probably in order. ;-)

Comment 17

[Andrew Hagen]

Definitely not meant for another bug.