306985 - Visited state of link can be cleared by incomplete middle-click

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core Graveyard :: History: Global, defect)

Description

[Bradley Chapman (not reading bugmail, still gone but not forever)]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050902 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050902 Firefox/1.0+

After a link in a page is marked visited and the page is reloaded, the visited
state can be cleared by performing an incomplete middle-click.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load a page with multiple links and load some of those links into new tabs.
2. Reload the page.
3. Place the mouse cursor over one of the visited links and hold down the middle
mouse button.
4. Move the mouse cursor away from the link and release the middle button.


Actual Results:  
The link changes colour from the visited state to the unvisited state.

Expected Results:  
The link should stay visited.

This only happens after the page is reloaded. If an incomplete middle-click is
performed right after loading the link, it remains the appropriate colour and
does not change.

roc once said that any link whose associated page does not fully load is never
marked visited, as per design. Is this quirk intended, or is it a bug?

Comment 1

[Bradley Chapman (not reading bugmail, still gone but not forever)]

CCing roc, as he wrote the fix for bug 78510.

Comment 2

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20050903
Firefox/1.6a1 ID:2005090308

Tried 6 pages but I could only reproduce this on a Google search results page.
There it removed even the visited style specified in userContent.css.

Comment 3

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

This is not a regression from 78510, right? I mean, did it happen before 78510
landed? How about in 1.0?

Comment 4

[Bradley Chapman (not reading bugmail, still gone but not forever)]

(In reply to comment #3)
> This is not a regression from 78510, right? I mean, did it happen before 78510
> landed? How about in 1.0?

It does _not_ happen in 1.0.6 (I just checked), and as far as I can recollect,
it never happened in any build before 78510 landed (if a build without 78510
that runs on Linux can be had, I'll check that too).

Adding regression keyword.

Comment 5

[kmike]

I guess it's not a FF/Mozilla bug, I'd say it's not bug at all.
I think it is caused by a smart technique Google uses to hide redirections on
their search results page.

Try this:
1. load google.com, search for "css"
2. hover mouse cursor over 1st result, observe "http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/" in
the status bar
2. middle click or right click on the first result
3. note that the status bar shows completely different link now

From the search results page source:
<a href="http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/" onmousedown="return rwt(this,'res','1','')">
rwt() function rewrites link to a different URL which isn't visited yet, so link
color changes after a middle/right click on it.

Comment 6

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Yeah, this is not a bug...