343917 - Use Current page as homepage is slightly broken

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[Adam Guthrie]

With the new preference window...

Steps to reproduce:
1. Go to a URL such as http://www.google.com/.
2. Go to Edit > Preferences and choose the "Use this page" radio button.

also..

3. Click the "Use Current" button.

Results:
After step 2 nothing is displayed in the textbox. When I close the pref. window the pref. isn't written either.

After step 3 the current URL is loaded in the textbox, and the page's title is also loaded in the "Use a Bookmark" textbox as well as that radio button being selected.

Expected results:
When the radio box is selected, update the textbox. Also, don't switch the radio box and update the page title when the "Use Current" button is pressed.

Comment 1

[Jeff Walden [:Waldo]]

(In reply to comment #0)
> 1. Go to a URL such as http://www.google.com/.
> 2. Go to Edit > Preferences and choose the "Use this page" radio button.
> 
> After step 2 nothing is displayed in the textbox. When I close the pref.
> window the pref. isn't written either.

This is intentional -- the URL written to prefs is the URL in the corresponding text field, and since there's nothing there, nothing is written.

This somewhat-unintuitive behavior is a result of the particular UI model chosen, which I think is theoretically better than the previous UI but is worse in practice, at least as I implemented it.  I can think of ways to change this to make this particular case a little better (populate the field with the current homepage choice on radio selection), but the problem would remain if you select the bookmark radio and then cancel (with a set homepage which isn't a bookmark [or, referring to the next comment, in history]).

Also, while I remember, there's some brokenness if you have Firefox Start selected and then select Bookmarks and then Current Page (or maybe the other way around) without activating a corresponding button or typing a URL.  That needs to be fixed, and this feels like a homepage preference UI meta-bug.

Comment 2

[Jeff Walden [:Waldo]]

(In reply to comment #0)
> 1. Go to a URL such as http://www.google.com/.
> 2. Go to Edit > Preferences and choose the "Use this page" radio button.
> 3. Click the "Use Current" button.
> 
> After step 3 the current URL is loaded in the textbox, and the page's title is
> also loaded in the "Use a Bookmark" textbox as well as that radio button being
> selected.

(Note: this particular concern is Places-specific and thus is not germane to 2.0 work, although handling of bookmark homepages with 2.0 code is sub-par for reasons easily understood by anyone familiar with the 2.0 bookmarks "API".)

http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/browser/components/preferences/main.js#102

The Places APIs let us determine whether a URL exists in bookmarks or history, but on my glance through the APIs I didn't see a way to determine whether a URL only exists in bookmarks or not.  Brett, did I just miss such an API, or is this something that needs to be taken into account as the Places code/API evolves?

Comment 3

[Jeff Walden [:Waldo]]

The home page prefs UI has changed, making this bug INVALID.  Feel free to file new bugs against the new UI, however.  :-)