[Linux] Firefox writes websites visited from a link in another application in recently-used.xbel
Categories
(Core :: Widget: Gtk, defect)
Tracking
()
People
(Reporter: riccardo.robecchi, Unassigned)
Details
Attachments
(1 file)
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27.17 KB,
image/png
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Details |
Screenshot_20240125_112105.png
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:122.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/122.0
Steps to reproduce:
I clicked on links in various applications (e.g. Slack), which then opened in Firefox.
Actual results:
Firefox wrote those links in recently-used.xbel. Here is an example of an entry:
<bookmark href="https://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-google-may-rank-ai-generated-content-over-original-news/505869/" added="2024-01-25T13:20:24.057000Z" modified="2024-01-25T13:20:24.057000Z" visited="2024-01-25T13:20:24.057000Z">
<info>
<metadata owner="http://freedesktop.org">
<mime:mime-type type="application/octet-stream"/>
<bookmark:applications>
<bookmark:application name="firefox" exec="firefox %u %u" modified="2024-01-25T13:20:24.057000Z" count="1"/>
</bookmark:applications>
</metadata>
</info>
</bookmark>
Expected results:
Firefox should not have written the links in recently-used.xbel.
No other browser does this because the .xbel file is meant to store a list of actual files, rather than websites; including those links means that accessing the "recently used" list in applications such as GIMP produces a list of websites (see attached picture), which is not of use anywhere but in a browser, which however already has its own history functionality.
It should also be noted that Firefox used not to do this before version 121.
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Comment 1•1 years ago
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The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Bookmarks & History' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.
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Comment 2•1 years ago
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Are you sure this is Firefox writing to the file, and not slack or something else?
I can't find any references to it in our code, but it could be happening via some API.
Moving across to the GTK component as they might know if there's some API that we're touching for this.
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Reporter | |
Comment 3•1 years ago
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I am not 100% sure, but the file reports Firefox as being the writing application, as you can see in the snippet I reported above. If anybody has ideas on how to verify this, I would be glad to do some tests.
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Comment 4•1 year ago
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Comment 5•1 year ago
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If you launch Firefox from any third party application it may be recorded.
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Comment 6•1 year ago
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The link you provided advises on how to disable the "recent files" feature entirely, which is not what I want as it is extremely useful in my workflow. What I don't want is Firefox adding to the "recent files" file. There is no reason why it should write to the recent files when it is not in fact opening one that is stored locally.
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Comment 7•1 year ago
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It should not add entry there if you open a link from Firefox. It may add a link if Firefox link is opened by other application.
Do you use Firefox snap?
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Reporter | |
Comment 8•1 year ago
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It does not add an entry when I open a link from Firefox, it does if I open a link from another application as explained in the OP. But the thing is that it should not, because the feature is meant to record actual files and not web pages (which are not accessible from other applications anyway).
I am using Firefox installed from deb.
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Comment 9•1 year ago
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(In reply to riccardo.robecchi from comment #8)
It does not add an entry when I open a link from Firefox, it does if I open a link from another application as explained in the OP. But the thing is that it should not, because the feature is meant to record actual files and not web pages (which are not accessible from other applications anyway).
If you open a webpage from another application it launches firefox instance and the page as an argument. So the feature works as expected.
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Comment 10•1 year ago
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I would argue it does not. The feature is meant to work with the "file://" URI scheme, as per the specification, which is arguably not what Web pages are made to work with. While the specification does not specifically exclude Web pages, the problem is that they are made of multiple files and this appears to be in direct contradiction with the single URI per file specification. In other words: how do you decide which file to retrieve when invoking "file://some.url.com"? Is it the main HTML file, a CSS file, an image, all of them? The specification is made to handle only one file at a time (or a directory, which is however treated as such and is not mixed with files). Which is why trying to open a Web page using the "recent files" feature invariably always fails.
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Comment 11•1 year ago
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recently-used.xbel is written / managed by Gtk/Gnome, not by Firefox itself. Please file a bug at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/. Firefox can't do anything here.
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Comment 12•1 year ago
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I would be more inclined to believe that if the issue had always been present, but it appeared after a Firefox update. And since no significant update has occurred on the GTK side, considering I am using a distribution based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, the possible reasons for the change in behaviour don't exactly seem to point towards GTK.
Description
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