304817 - History items (both in sidebar and separate window) are not sorted

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Shriramana Sharma]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20050813 SeaMonkey/1.0a
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20050813 SeaMonkey/1.0a

In Firefox (1_06), I see all history items sorted, whatever way I choose to view
it. This feature has never existed in SeaMonkey (previous Mozilla Suite) and
it's really problematic. Neither the history item in the sidebar not the
separate history manager accessible by Ctrl+H has any sort facility. This is
very very inconvenient and should be fixed as soon as possible. The presence of
the History is useless if it is not easily readable. The Ctrl+H history manager
supposedly has a sort option but it is useless on my build and I am unable to
move from "Unsorted" to anything else.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Visit a number of websites, *different* websites.
2. Open the sidetab by hitting F9 and go to the history tab (or) visit the
history window by hitting Ctrl+H
3. Search for a way to sort the history

Actual Results:  
There was no way to sort the history

Expected Results:  
It should have provided me with a way to sort the history.

Comment 1

[Hermann Schwab]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20050814 SeaMonkey/1.0a

Confirming, there is a sort menu, and entries were checked, but I couldn't get
the checkmark back from unsorted to sorted.
Workaround: In the History Manager (Ctrl+H) use
View->Group By (Day | Site | None)

Comment 2

[Shriramana Sharma]

(In reply to comment #1)

> Confirming, there is a sort menu, and entries were checked, but I couldn't get
> the checkmark back from unsorted to sorted.
> Workaround: In the History Manager (Ctrl+H) use
> View->Group By (Day | Site | None)

Well I think that the real workaround is to hit one of the column headers
labeled "Title" "Location" "Last Visited" etc.

Reason I think your workaround doesn't work always:

After hitting one of the tabs and getting the Sorted By menu item to change, hit
Unsorted on the menu, and then try your method of choosing Group By > Day | Site
| None. No effect. It doesn't get automatically shifted from Unsorted to Sorted.
The key is whether one of the columns is selected for sorting or not.

That said, this sort order should be enforceable from the menu, and one should
not be forced to use the column headers.

And I now restate my original report of the bug, which was slightly off the mark:

In the latest SeaMonkey nightly, both in the sidebar and the "History Manager"
(Ctrl+H) window, it is possible to sort the history items, but:

1. sorting by title should be by default switched on

2. when sort by date and site is used, the sites within each date and the pages
within each site, should also be sorted on the desired sorting method (title,
location, last visited etc)

3. the History Manager View menu is buggy as described at the top of this post

4. also consider forgoing the "yesterday" "today" usage, which makes for
non-intuitive sorting, especially when combined with stuff like "2 weeks ago"
etc, in favour of something more mathematically uniform: like individual dates,
perhaps, in ISO 8601 format.

Comment 3

[Cédric "chewey" Menge]

WFM in SM 1.1.9, via both menu and column header click.