History stopped being recorded in Firefox 124 (History library not being updated, and colours of visited links not shown)
Categories
(Toolkit :: Places, defect)
Tracking
()
People
(Reporter: terauck, Unassigned)
Details
Attachments
(2 files)
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:124.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/124.0
Steps to reproduce:
I loaded a link on web pages and on local html files. Examples of websites affected are facebook.com, mozillazine.org and reddit.com.
Actual results:
The colours of the visited links were unchanged.
Expected results:
The colours should have changed to the colours for visited links.
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Updated•1 year ago
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Comment 2•1 year ago
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Hmm, I can't reproduce (testing Firefox 124.0 release). I suspect/hope this might be something specific to your machine or Firefox profile; it'd be quite surprising if this sort of bug made it to release without anyone noticing until now.
If you're still seeing this issue: can you try the attached testcase? Are you seeing links show up as visited there, if you click them? (They show up as visited for me, if/when I visit the sites, when I view this testcase as a local file -- except for the 4th link that I've included, which is to a nonexistent domain and hence is permanently unvisited even if you attempt to visit it.)
Assuming you can still reproduce: could you test with a fresh Firefox profile? (Visit about:profiles, click Create a profile and then Launch profile in new browser for that newly-generated profile. Warning, the profile manager will automatically make the new one become the default, so you'll want to then click "Set as default profile" on your original profile.)
There are a handful of bits of profile-specific configuration that could produce the situation that you're describing:
- Running in Private Browsing or "Never Remember History" mode.
- Having about:config
layout.css.visited_links_enabledbeing set tofalse - In the Firefox preferences "Colors" section, someone could hypothetically choose visited and unvisited links as being the same color.
- Or, there could conceivably be some sort of add-on interfering here, e.g. changing how visited links are styled, for some sort of promised privacy benefit for example.
(I'm not necessarily saying any of those are the specific culprit here, but they could conceivably be, if any of them apply to you.)
Thank you. I tested facebook.com with a # added. That made no difference.
I do not run in private browsing mode, have that preference set to false, settings with the same colours or any recent change to add-ons.
I have created a new profile and the issue is not present there. I have been unable to ascertain why.
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Comment 5•1 year ago
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(In reply to watchman from comment #4)
Thank you. I tested facebook.com with a # added. That made no difference.
Right, that shouldn't really make a difference, other than it's an easy way to link back to a version of the same page (which I do in my testcase).
Anyway -- I take it that if you load my testcase and click the links and then load the testcase again, the links still show up as if they're un-visited?
I do not run in private browsing mode, have that preference set to false, settings with the same colours or any recent change to add-ons.
I have created a new profile and the issue is not present there. I have been unable to ascertain why.
That's good news at least, in terms of this probably-not-being-a-broader-Firefox-bug. That means something is somehow broken in your main Firefox profile, but it's hard to know what it could be at a distance (particularly if it's not any of the things in comment 2). The only other thing I can think of is that maybe your history database got corrupted somehow, and so when Firefox records a page visit there, maybe it fails to get saved (and hence, links ~correctly don't show up as visited, since they're just reflecting the state of what's present in your history database).
Using the profile that triggers the bug... Could you check the Firefox history-manager[1] and see if sites are showing up there (as you visit them) in a regular Firefox window, vs. if they're not showing up in the history manager at all?
[1] To get to the history manager window: click Firefox's main three-line-menu, then History, and then "Manage History" at the very bottom. And then in there, you'd probably want to click "Today" to see the sites you've visited today.
Thanks again. Yes, the links in testcase show up as unvisited.
Using the profile that triggers the bug, sites aren't showing in history as I visit them in a regular Firefox window. I didn't copy places.sqlite to the new profile. I tried renaming the two places files with Firefox closed then restarting the browser. The bug persisted after that renaming.
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Comment 7•1 year ago
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Assuming you're still seeing this problem with your normal profile, could you attach a copy of the "Troubleshooting Information" from about:support? There might be a clue in there that'd help us identify what's happening.
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Comment 8•1 year ago
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(Also: given that the root issue here seems to be related to history being recorded/not-recorded, let's clarify the title and reclassify this to Toolkit|Places which is where that code lives. Maybe the folks involved in that component have some other ideas about troubleshooting steps here, or something that could've changed that broke this for some profiles recently.)
The faulty profile is no longer my normal profile and I had removed it. I have reinstated it temporarily and extracted the troubleshooting information. I will try to attach it (don't know how).
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Reporter | |
Comment 10•1 year ago
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Comment 11•1 year ago
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That shows places.history.enabled: false which disables history entirely, so that means the described behavior here is in fact things working-as-expected. :)
Not sure how that pref would have gotten disabled without your knowledge; maybe an inadvertent click on about:config?
In any case: do things go back to normal of you re-enable that pref in about:config?
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Reporter | |
Comment 12•1 year ago
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Yes, visited links show after changing that preference back to the default.
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Comment 13•1 year ago
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Ok, thanks for confirming that.
I'm going to close this as 'invalid' then, since this turned out to be things working as-expected, given the state of that pref; and the only mystery here is how that pref got flipped. And I'm not sure we can learn that without a time machine.
(If this does happen to be a broader problem where an extension or external program or something is flipping that pref on behalf of users somehow, then hopefully more reports will come in, and we can try to learn more from them and gather patterns etc.)
Description
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