Closed Bug 22788 Opened 25 years ago Closed 14 years ago

Spawned windows should inherit previous page in history

Categories

(SeaMonkey :: UI Design, enhancement, P3)

Product:
SeaMonkey
Component:
UI Design
Type:
enhancement

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED EXPIRED
Milestone:
Future

People

(Reporter: sidr, Assigned: samir_bugzilla)

Details

In Mozilla, as in Communicator 4.7, if a page is loaded in a new window
via the context menu or javascript, the new browser window that the page
appears in will have nothing at all in its Session History, just as if it
were the first window after launch.

This creates a useability problem if the user closes the first window before,
upon reading the contents of the new window, deciding to bookmark the
wonderful site that led to such a useful page (this isn't an academic
scenario, I've seen it happen). In more general terms, the connection to
the referring page is totally lost, which doesn't help for those unfamiliar
with hypertext navigation. As a help to them, being able to back out to the
previous page makes sense.

This RFE is filed as an alternative to bug 18808, "Spawned windows should
inherit back button/go menu history" (all of it), which, according to the
reporter of bug 22721, is what IE does. But by doing this, the "beginning
point" for a new window is no longer rooted: after further navigation in
the new window, there is no obvious indication of what the first page in the
new window was.

This proposal fixes that problem by preloading only the immediately previous
page into the new window's session history, giving context without an
open-ended history.
Assignee: german → don
I agree each window should be rooted in it's own session history, however all
windows are linked to the same 'persistent' history (the one you get with Ctrl-
H). Forwarding to Don/ XPApps
QA Contact: paulmac → claudius
Summary: RFE: Spawned windows should inherit previous page in history → [RFE] Spawned windows should inherit previous page in history
Target Milestone: M20
Hmmmm.  Y'know I don't really care for the IE behavior.  The 4.7 behavior is
actually more "natural" or "logical" in the sense that a window's session
history is empty at the moment of creation.  I mean, isn't that what a session
is?  I believe the concept of a session is married to the existenace of a
window.  I don't really like the idea of pre-loading a new window with the
previous page's session history.  What does "previous" mean?  The previously
created window?  The last active window?  That's not path to an intuitive
behavior.

But feel free to argue with me. :-)
First, this bug is not asking for the entire session history of the "previous"
window - that is bug 18808. This RFE is asking for only for the immediately
previous page, the one that a new window is spawned from, to be preloaded
into the session history of that new window.

This is a compromise between the open-ended history in each window asked for
by bug 18808 (also the IE behaviour), and the complete lack of context
provided by NN 4.7 and earlier for how a page in a new window was reached.
Not all pages in new windows are by the user's choice, some are as a result
of TARGET=, and in this case the user may well wish to be able to return to the
page from whence the new page was whelped.

If neither this proposal nor the proposal in 18808 are implemented, another
way for the user to "get back where I came from" would be to add a final
item to the "Go" menu, called "More...", which would bring up the same dialog
as "Tasks>Tools>History" ... too many people don't even know that's there.
(Or perhaps a "Referer" item). (I should write this up as yet another RFE).

I too, prefer a rooted view of the history, but I'd rather not give up the
most cogent element of the History, the referer of the current page, to get it.
I'm exactly sure how session history handles redirects and the like, but what about those sites
(you know which ones) that like to use a lot of redirects and javascript to spawn windows and
effectively trap the user at the site. This would only exacerbate the situation.
-or the case where the new window is superimposed on top of the previous window. Often the quickest
visual indication that you have a new window and not just a new page is that fwd/back are deactivated.
I can only see bad things happening here.

given all that I would still like to see some way to know from where new windows were spawned.
Added, to address that last point independently of this RFE, bug 23926,
"[RFE] Add "Referring Page" item to Go menu".
How would you like it if we disabled the back button to indicate the page has
errors in it to web devlopers?  You can still use the menu!

This discussion is about important functionality that should not be disabled. 
If you want an indication of a new window, the status bar is there, and an RFE
is waiting to be filed.
Given a choice between this plan and the one in bug 18808, I'd prefer that one 
but regaining one level of backtracking is better than nothing.

Since Don asked for an argument, I'll oblige :-) To my mind, opening in a new 
window splits the session into two equal streams. Given that the only visual 
clue to distinguish the parent and child is the greyed-out back button (and that 
disappears if a new link is followed), to me it seems unituitive to have to keep 
track which of 5 identical looking CNN pages is the parent. A quick survey of my 
coworkers (n=4) supports this view.

This is as unintuitive as anything. Why back one page? What is the mental model 
or analogy you're using here? Why not back two, or five? Bug 18808 makes a whole 
lot more sense than this does, IMO.
OS: Windows NT → All
Hardware: PC → All
Move to "Future" milestone.
Target Milestone: M20 → Future
*** Bug 59979 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Since Don has left, Vishy is taking his bugs in bulk, pending reassignment.
thanks,
	Vishy
Assignee: don → vishy
nav triage team:

Would be nice, the problem is that mozilla can't reload the page from cache at 
the moment. Would suck for things like shopping where you just got confirmation 
of an order and want to open a new window... which reorders your stuff for you, 
whoops. Marking nsbeta1-, though we should probably add a dependency on the 
corresponding cache bug if there is one.
Keywords: nsbeta1-
The Back history could be limited to a maximum of ten previously visited pages.
You don't need to have the entire history at your disposal. For that, you have
the History tab in My Sidebar.
Reassigning to a real person.
Assignee: vishy → sgehani
QA Contact: claudius → paw
Summary: [RFE] Spawned windows should inherit previous page in history → Spawned windows should inherit previous page in history
Product: Core → Mozilla Application Suite
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614
Status: NEW → UNCONFIRMED
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614
MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but still has no comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project 5 years ago.

Because of this, we're resolving the bug as EXPIRED.

If you still can reproduce the bug on SeaMonkey 2 or otherwise think it's still valid, please REOPEN it and if it is a platform or toolkit issue, move it to the according component.

Query tag for this change: EXPIRED-20100420
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 14 years ago
Resolution: --- → EXPIRED
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