248876 - [RFE] synchronise homepage with nominated bookmark folder

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 208182

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement)

Description

[Neil Conway]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.9
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.9

When I set my Firebird homepage to a folder of bookmarks, the bookmarks of the
folder are opened, each page in a separate tab. So far so good. The problem
occurs if I subsequently modify the content of the folder -- those modifications
are not reflected in the set of URLs used as my homepage.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[David Tenser [:djst]]

The Set as Home Page feature doesn't really use a bookmark folder, it's just
copying the bookmark entries in that folder to the Home Page pref. Actually
using a bookmark folder would require loading the bookmark file first and use a
completely new technique and I doubt it would be fast.

OS -> All

Comment 2

[Neil Conway]

I realize that's what is going on under the covers, but I don't think it is very
intuitive user behavior. If that's a necessary tradeoff we need to make for
perf.,   that's one thing, but it would be good to have some evidence that doing
it properly is actually too slow to be feasible. I'm pretty skeptical that it
really would be that slow...

Comment 3

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

evidence?  if you use the bookmarks toolbar folder, its the last thing to become
available during startup.  We'd have to load the bookmarks into memory, then
access the folder and do an open in tabs type of operation at that point,
meaning that the app would be pretty much fully loaded before we start trying to
connect to the sites, which is not how we currently do it.  As a test, try
setting your home page to blank, then middle-clicking on a bookmark folder as
soon as it appears.  That's the relative performance (roughly) and why this
would be a pain on slower systems.

Comment 4

[Neil Conway]

So is there some fundamental reason that parsing the bookmarks file needs to be
done late in the startup process? I think if we could have the bookmark
information available early, we could kick off the asynchronous load of the
homepages early as well.

As I said before, I think the point here is that the current mechanism is a
hack. If it's a hack that is absolutely necessary for performance reasons, then
fine, that's a necessary evil -- I'm just not sure that's the case.

Comment 5

[Ariel Burone]

The bookmarks.html file can become very large. If you fully load this at firs,
there can be a big delay (my bookmarks.html is 400kb large...)

One option can be to update the homepage information when the bookmarks are
modified or when you exit the program...

Just an idea

Comment 6

[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:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 7

[John Vandenberg]

I rarely change the homepage because it is too cumbersome to do so on a regular
basis.  OTOH, selecting a folder to _be_ the homepage would allow users to
easily manage what will start next launch, by adding/removing items to the
folder using the menu, Crtl-D, or the Bookmark Manager.

Ariel's comment on how it could be implemented without incurring performance
problems seems reasonable.

Comment 8

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs,
filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change

Comment 9

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 208182 ***