251874 - Better control over Location Bar entries.

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core Graveyard :: Tracking, enhancement)

Description

[Jason Bassford]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a3) Gecko/20040716
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a3) Gecko/20040716

The idea for this feature request came from a Mozillazine post
(http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=655300) and, in answering it, I
realised it was something that's been slightly annoying to me for a couple of
years now.

Currently, you can clear the Location Bar of all of its history via Edit ->
Preferences -> History -> Clear Location Bar.  However, this is an all or
nothing approach and there is no GUI method of removing one or more single
entries short of hand-editing localstore.rdf which is tricky and dangerous for
anybody who doesn't know what they're doing.

We have a history manager (CTRL-H) which allows for fine-grained removal of
items from history.  We should have something similar for the Location Bar. 
Either something just like the history manager, or the ability to right-click on
an entry in the Location Bar and selete "Delete" or "Remove".

If this is a duplicate of another bug, feel free to mark it as such or point me
in its direction so that I can do so.  (A cursory search did not reveal
anything, but I may have missed it.)

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Jason Bassford]

Alternatively, the whole History / Location Bar scheme could be reworked.  URLs
that are hand-entered could be stored in history.dat with a flag.   The location
bar could then draw its entries not from localstore.rdf, but from the
history.dat file, including only those entries in history that were hand-entered.

If this were done, then we'd already have a front-end GUI for the removal of
single entries - the history manager itself.  It would also simplify the
quasi-duplication of history vs. location bar.

Comment 2

[R.K.Aa.]

bug 87098, bug 157751

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 87098 ***

Comment 3

[Jason Bassford]

Excellent - but reopening this bug anyway, and making that bug a dependency. 
There are several different methods of implement better Location Bar control and
that is only one of them.  I'm going to turn this bug into a tracking bug and
open another one for an actual GUI for the location bar entries akin to CTRL-H.

Comment 4

[Andrei Boros]

One suggestion would be a dedicated bookmarks folder, just like the "Personal Toolbar Folder" that is used to display the personal toolbar. 

Comment 5

[bomfog]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Excellent - but reopening this bug anyway, and making that bug a dependency. 
> There are several different methods of implement better Location Bar control and
> that is only one of them.  I'm going to turn this bug into a tracking bug and
> open another one for an actual GUI for the location bar entries akin to CTRL-H.

I suggest pruning the summary at the slash--removing single entries is pretty well covered by the dependent bugs and the "remove single entries" part is just clutter, IMO.

Also, how about generalizing it to "Better control over Autocomplete entries"?

Comment 6

[Jason Bassford]

Modifying the summary as suggested.  Not changing to "autocomplete", however, because the location bar and autocomplete, though related, are not the same thing.

Comment 7

[BMO Automation]

Marking all tracking bugs which haven't been updated since 2014 as INCOMPLETE.
If this bug is still relevant, please reopen it and move it into a bugzilla component related to the work
being tracked. The Core: Tracking component will no longer be used.