1805267 - History By Date (or Date And Site) is sorted by title, that is confusing

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect, P3)

Description

[Henry Green [:harperG]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/109.0

Steps to reproduce:

in nightly, I open my search history using the Ctrl+H shortcut and click the dropdown box for 'today'

Actual results:

The most recent website in the history was something I had visited 2 hours ago and I knew that I had visited at least 50 new websites since I had last visited the last visible entry in my history

Expected results:

History should have been up to date with all the other websites I had visited during the time between the last entry and the time when I viewed the history, like other major web browsers

Comment 1

[Monica Chiorean]

I was able to reproduce the issue on Win10x64 using FF build 109.0a1(20221210092830), meaning that last visited site is not the first on the list and seems same behavior is on build 97.0a1(20211208214306). Marking issue as new in waiting for developers input. Thank you.

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

only the "By last visited" view is sorted by last visit date, the "by Date" view is sorted by title, and urls without a title will appear first.
I agree it's confusing, but the whole history ui is, we're looking into long term redesigns.
You can change the view mode with the dropdown close to the search input field.

Comment 3

[jackyzy823]

Add a simple line sortingMode = NHQO.SORT_BY_DATE_DESCENDING; at here could solve the problem.

But well, your long-term-redesigns.

Another workaroud is to use SmartBookmark , you can create a bookmark which url(Places Query URI ) is place:queryType=0&type=3&sort=4 (similar to Most Visited bookmark) . wait until the icon become a gear logo (restart or any other bookmark operations) and now you can view history in the sidebar of bookmark and with date descending.

Comment 4

[James Teow [:jteow]]

It is indeed simple to apply your code change jackyzy823. However, it is not zero sum, users who currently use the feature may be expecting to see the current behaviour of history items listed in alphabetical order. Thus, making the change would solve this bug but we might be adding a future regression containing similar complaints that would be resolvable using the same process as the workarounds for this bug.

There's ongoing exploration/work on presenting search history in a different way to the user. We're in agreement that the current sidebar behaviour is not ideal (see comment #2), but we believe that impending work will address this situation. So for now, I think the best thing to do is to use one of the workarounds, especially using the "View" dropdown.