240646 - history and url bar get confused after passing long string to custom keyword bookmark

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Core :: DOM: Navigation, defect)

Description

[Marc Bejarano]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113

i know the summary sucks, but i can't think of a better one :(  i keep trying
newer releases and they all suffer from the same bug.  for me, everything i've
tried that is newer than 1.6R has this issue.  this includes 1.7b and
yesterday's nightly build.

after i've been browsing for a while, the browser gets badly confused.  the
symptoms are that i lose all history for the particular window that is confused
(ie: back button gets grayed out) and the location bar starts misbehaving
(custom keywords no longer expand to the real URL and the location bar
autocomplete quits).

reverting back to the 1.6 release always makes the bad behavior go away.

Reproducible: Sometimes
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Olivier Cahagne]

same for me since nightly build 20040320, once in a while, history gets lost,
quite annoying.

Comment 2

[Marc Bejarano]

i still see this with 1.7RC1 :(  this really aught to block the 1.7 release.  it
makes the browser fairly worthless for people like me that this is happening to.

Comment 3

[Andrew Hagen]

When this problem comes up, could someone please post their history.dat? Try to
save a copy of it while Mozilla is running. Then close Mozilla and make another
copy of the file.

If there is a privacy concern, please just save the file somewhere. Then post a
comment that you have the file. If the bug is confirmed and a developer works on
it, then you could e-mail it directly to him.

Comment 4

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

without specific steps to reproduce or a corrupted history file in hand, this
bug isn't going to get fixed any time soon. 

Comment 5

[Marc Bejarano]

paying a bit more attention, the bug seems to be triggered when i use a custom
keyword shortcut.  i do this by pressing CTRL-L to highlight the text in the URL
bar and then use, eg, "bug 240646" which expands to
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=240646 via the bookmark with the
"bug" custom keyword.

anyway, i saved the history.dat file while the browser was up in the confused
state and then closed the browswer and restarted it and saved another copy.  the
files were identical except that the newer file had the following tacked onto
the end of it:
===

@$${1012{@
@$$}1012}@

@$${1013{@
@$$}1013}@

@$${1014{@
@$$}1014}@

@$${1015{@
@$$}1015}@

@$${1016{@
@$$}1016}@

@$${1017{@
@$$}1017}@

@$${1018{@
@$$}1018}@

@$${1019{@
@$$}1019}@
===
i doubt that helps :(  i'm happy to provide remote access to my machine to a
developer if they want to poke around while mozilla is in this state.  it
happens far too often and due to bug 242285, i'm now stuck like this... i'm
miserable.

Comment 6

[Marc Bejarano]

Yes!!  i can now reliably reproduce the bug :D

any time i pass my custom keyword bookmark a %s of 18 characters or more, the
bug is triggered.  eg if i put "bug 12345678901234567" into the location bar,
all is well.  as soon as i put in "bug 123456789012345678", the browser gets
confused.

olivier: can you see if the same happens in your profile?

asa: now can we block 1.7?  you have no idea how annoying this bug is for folks
that live by their custom keywords....

Comment 7

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

(In reply to comment #6)
> any time i pass my custom keyword bookmark a %s of 18 characters or more, the
> bug is triggered.  eg if i put "bug 12345678901234567" into the location bar,
> all is well.  as soon as i put in "bug 123456789012345678", the browser gets
> confused.

[Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040421] (<-- 1.7rc1 !)
(W98SE)

I couldn't reproduce...

Could you be more specific on the steps ? (before/after)
Does this happen with a new profile ?

Comment 8

[Marc Bejarano]

serge: bummer.. this doesn't happen with a new profile :(  i repeat my offer to
let a developer have remote access to my machine or i can zip up my profile and
let them take it for a spin.  at least now i can reproduce it in my profile.

Comment 9

[Andrew Schultz]

> serge: bummer.. this doesn't happen with a new profile 

to narrow down why this happening, you can
1. backup your profile.
2. remove preference settings, files like abook.mab until the bug is "fixed"
3. put those preferences back and remove others
4. keep going until you have an almost clean profile.

let us know what is need to do to a clean profile to get it to exhibit the bug.

does deleting history.dat by itself fix the bug?

Comment 10

[Marc Bejarano]

i tried playing around for a while, but wasn't able to isolate what triggers the
bug.  the history.dat and the bookmarks.htm alone weren't enough to do it.  i'd
be happy to provide a zipped copy of the troublesome profile to a developer who
wants to debug.

Comment 11

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
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Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 12

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.