247893 - Go menu uses global history instead of session history

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement)

Description

[Ocie Hudson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.9
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.9

The GO menu (session history list?) is not the same in Firefox as it is in
Netscape Navigator (7.1 and prior).  It wasn't "broke", so why did you "fix
it"?? :-(  I am accustomed to, for example, going to the salon.com premium
log-in page, which will take me to the home page after the log-in is processed.
 There, I select an article to read.  Suppose that it is displayed over 5
sequential web pages.  Do _you_ want to hit the "Back" button 5 times to return
to the homepage??  _I_ don't.  Instead, I just use the GO list to choose the
home page, of course.  BUT with Firefox, the history list is like the one in
I.E., namely, it contains an entry for a page only once regardless of how many
times the page was accessed.  (So, it is not really a "history" or "log" of the
actual order in which pages were selected and displayed.)  The consequence is
that after I have selected and read only a few articles, the salon.com homepage
is no longer on the GO list.  In summary, I really like the way that it is
implemented in Netscape Navigator 7.1 -- indeed, the usefulness of the GO
feature is the principal reason that I have preferred Netscape Navigator 7.1
instead of Internet Explorer!!  Why do you want the Firefox GO feature to
function like the lousy "history" feature of Internet Explorer 6.x ??

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.see details
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

If you want direct access to session history, right-click the Back button.  It's
a bigger target than the Go menu on Windows anyway :)

Comment 2

[Bogdan Stroe]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 185055 ***

Comment 3

[Jesse Ruderman]

This is not a dup of bug 185055.

Comment 4

[David Tenser [:djst]]

-> INVALID.

The current behavior is by design, and is the only option the Go menu was added
(by Blake Ross in Phoenix 0.2 iirc).

Comment 5

[David Tenser [:djst]]

s/option/reason

Comment 6

[Jo Hermans]

*** Bug 277730 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Kevin Brosnan]

*** Bug 321052 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[Dan Harkless]

I understand this is by design, but that doesn't mean the new design is superior to the design long standard in Mozilla Suite and Netscape Navigator (and NSCA Mosaic before that, IIRC).  It also doesn't preclude there being an option to choose between whether you want the traditional session history listing or the new-style recent pages list.

As I said in my duplicate bug 321052 (did search before filing it, but didn't come across this one):

I have always found IE's method of navigating backwards and forwards in the
current window's browsing "stack" unintuitive and hard to use.  

Always greatly preferred Netscape/Mozilla's Go menu.  With the Go menu you can
see at a single glance where the page you're looking at fits into the history
stack, and you can make repeated arbitrary navigations forward and backward
without having to first think about which of the left and right arrows'
pulldown menus to activate.  

With the arrow menus, you have to mentally compare the contents of one of the
menus with the other to envision the browsing stack, and think about what being
farther down in the menu means in the left arrow menu vs. the right arrow menu
(in one, newer pages are higher up, while in the other, newer windows are lower
down).  Also, the little pulldown menu arrows are a much trickier target to hit
quickly with the mouse than the well-spaced Go menu heading.  Speaking of the
mouse, if you use extra buttons on it for Back and Forward, you can remove the
Back and Forward onscreen buttons to make more room for the URL bar, but only
if the traditional Mozilla Go menu functionality is there.

Unfortunately in Firefox the wonderful traditional functionality of the Go menu
was removed.  In its place, a list of recently visited pages was unintuitively
substituted.  I know that many people besides me find this list of recent pages
useless, as there are multiple Firefox extensions that cause the Go menu to not
appear (of course some people do this because it causes huge delays if you
don't restrict yourself to a very short History lifetime -- see bug 222717).

Unfortunately there aren't any extensions to bring back the old Go menu
functionality, rather than removing it altogether, so I have to request that
the old functionality be restored in Firefox itself, either unconditionally or
under control of a preference.

Another reason this is important is for accessibility reasons.  Bug 169346 comment 1 makes an excellent point that navigation backwards and forwards in a long history stack is very painful for keyboard users with the traditional Go menu functionality having been removed.  Bug 169346 is marked as FIXED, but it is _not_, since that commenter's accessibility issue was not addressed by the implementation of a Go menu with a semi-random list of recent pages, rather than the current window/tab's history stack.  [Unfortunately I can't add the "access" keyword to this bug since I am not the reporter.]

Comment 9

[Jesse Ruderman]

I filed bug 321080 on the accessibility issue Dan Harkless brought up.

Comment 10

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** Bug 324070 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** Bug 324736 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** Bug 324736 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***