321936 - Set favicon for redirected pages

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect, P4)

Description

[Brett Wilson]

Redirected pages will often not have titles or favicons associated with them. This is especially true for pages redirected with a HTTP 3XX code. However, if the destionation page does have a title or favicon, the redirect source should inherit that information.

This will give better results in history views. More importantly, it means that if the user types in the URL for a bookmark, it will get the proper favicon even if it is a redirect. This will be common, as many pages redirect to something more complicated.

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

I suspect my use-case isn't common enough to merit consideration, but: I have several bookmarks to urls that redirect to "a random *" (random blog from three sets of data, random image from two different sources, things like that) which will then always look like what they were the time before.

Comment 2

[Brett Wilson]

(In reply to comment #1)

I was thinking for a bit that it might be cool to allow users to change/override icons, which would help your use case. But this seems like overkill, at least for now.

Comment 3

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Do you mean allow from a UI perspective, or from an implementation perspective?  As long as the implementation allows it, extensions will fill that gap nicely for those who care.

Comment 4

[Brett Wilson]

I was talking about both. UI would be kind of hard, making implementation the backend not a good use of time.

We'd have to add some kind of "permanent" flag to each history item for the favicon to know not to change it when the site declares a different one, then check it every time we want to do anything, have APIs to access it, etc. This is a lot of cruft for theoretical extensions.

Comment 5

[Brett Wilson]

When a favicon arrives, we need to check all redirects to the page in question using the function specified in bug 319910. Then set the favicons for those pages.

Comment 6

[Brett Wilson]

See bug 327841, that favicon change does this for bookmarked pages, the only ones that are likely worth worrying about.

Comment 7

[Brett Wilson]

Fixed by bug 327841 on branch and trunk. It only handles the case for bookmarks, but this should be sufficient. Normally redirect pages won't appear in history at all, and trying to set all redirected pages would waste time and memory keeping track of it all.

Comment 8

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Bug 451915 - move Firefox/Places bugs to Firefox/Bookmarks and History. Remove all bugspam from this move by filtering for the string "places-to-b-and-h".

In Thunderbird 3.0b, you do that as follows:
Tools | Message Filters
Make sure the correct account is selected. Click "New"
Conditions: Body   contains   places-to-b-and-h
Change the action to "Delete Message".
Select "Manually Run" from the dropdown at the top.
Click OK.

Select the filter in the list, make sure "Inbox" is selected at the bottom, and click "Run Now". This should delete all the bugspam. You can then delete the filter.

Gerv