Closed Bug 37324 Opened 26 years ago Closed 26 years ago

Start with Last Page Visited pref loads default mail page

Categories

(Core :: DOM: Navigation, defect, P3)

Product:
Core
Component:
DOM: Navigation
Type:
defect

Tracking

()

Status:
VERIFIED FIXED

People

(Reporter: bugzilla, Assigned: radha)

References

Details

(Whiteboard: [nsbeta2+]Fix in hand. Being reviewed. ETA 7/17)

Build ID: 2000042608 With the Last Page Visited pref on (Edit | Preferences | Navigator), I've gotten a non-functioning copy of the Search tab from the sidebar to load upon starting up, as well as the normal default Mail & News email that's in your mailbox when you first create an account ("Welcome to Mail & News", etc). The Mail & News one I can reproduce by just opening mail, then choosing File | Quit and restarting Moz. I've had a little trouble getting the Search panel to appear in the content area again (it was a similar copy but didn't have the search engines listed, of course, since they're not getting loaded). I'm not even sure how that happened, I assume I closed moz with the Search tab open though I haven't been able to repro it yet. In short, it should really only log the last URL you've been to that's on your history list, not the Mail & News message or a sidebar panel.
Sorry bout that, didn't mean the Mail & News email, I meant the page that loads in the bottom frame of Mail & News when you load it and haven't clicked on a message yet (or don't have any)... aka http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/start.html
hi blake, i might be misunderstanding what you're seeing --but are you saying that the Last Page Viewed prefs isn't working at all? if not, pls do clarify with the steps you took to reproduce it. thx! anyhow, this is what i did, and see: 1. surf around with the web, end up at, say, http://www.supersnail.com/ 2. open up the Preferences dialog. 3. select the Navigator category. 4. under "Navigator starts with" select the radiobutton for "Last page visited." [side note: under the "Homepage" section, the Location textfield is blank, till i click in it, and it's http://www.mozilla.org/quality/ --i don't change this, however.] 5. click OK to save and dismiss Preferences. 6. quit and restart browser. result: the homepage that i see is http://www.supersnail.com/, which is what i expect to see anyhow. i wonder...would there be something w/sidebar or mail that's triggering what you're seeing, or the particular page you're viewing? cc'ing lisa, claudius and shir...
hey-- no, the preference works fine. I'm just saying that it picks up sites it shouldn't. For example, one time, somehow, it displayed the contents of the sidebar search panel in the right-hand browser content area. It also displays that "Welcome to Mozilla Mail & News" message that appears in the bottom frame of the Mail window if you haven't selected a message (actually, I don't have an account set up in Mail right now, so I don't know if that message just appears if no account is set up yet or what). Anyways, here's some steps you can use to reproduce what I'm talking about: (1) Start Moz (2) Type "http://www.mozilla.org" in the URL bar and hit enter. (2) Open Mail, ensure that the "Welcome to Mozilla Mail & News" message (the same one that's at http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/start.html) is in the bottom half of the screen. (3) Go to File | Quit (4) Restart Mozilla. Rather than http://www.mozilla.org loading, the Mail & News welcome message displays. I don't believe this is the correct behavior, since the user didn't voluntarily navigate to that "site" and thus it isn't really the last site he/she visited. This could be really confusing...instead, the pref should read the last URL on the session history list (which the Mail & News message doesn't appear to be added to) and use that as the "last visited site." Do you see what I'm saying now? I realize I'm explaining it kind of confusingly, just lmk if you still aren't sure :)
I've repro'd this with the 2000042611-moz build on WinNT and it's gonna be XP. This one's easy, http://sidebar.mcom.com/sidebar/whatever was the last visited page in my global history. I have my sidebar open by default on startup and the news tab was the open one. So the prefs is doing what it's coded to do but that may not be the right thing for the big picture. i want sidebar stuff in my global history, maybe not mail stuff though. It also doesn't make any sense for this to be a start page, but it is an html page just like any other. Global history is waterson, cc'ing to see if he has any comment. to repro. open your sidebar and restart. On restart click the 'last page visited' pref and restart again. You'll start with whatever sidebar panel you were looking at loaded in the browser window.
OS: Windows 98 → All
Hardware: PC → All
add travis... looks like we need to figure out a way to make it so that sidebar panels are not added to the global history.
Actually, I couldn't reproduce the sidebar problem with the steps you gave--not sure why, they sounded valid. In any case, I'm a little confused - do you agree that if they open mail and then shut down everything, that welcome message should be considered their last visited page? Or do you think it should be changed? I think the sidebar pages are definitely a problem, but I also think the Mail/News could be confusing to the user.
to answer blake's question, I didn't mention mail cuz I didn't even think that page should be added to the global history at all - much less picked up as 'last visited' but that's a whole other story cuz we'd have to distinguish between pages I actually surfed to and whatever you want to call pages like that. I just noticed part of blake's earlier comment: "instead, the pref should read the last URL on the session history list (which the Mail & News message doesn't appear to be added to) and use that as the "last visited site." sounded like a good idea to me. couldn't 'last visited' apply to the session history, INSTEAD of Global history? of course, you'd have to be sure to always use the topmost window's session history or something but that shouldn't be too hard (he says cuz he doesn't have to write code)?
hey, I'm not sure how well the idea would work. It seems like it would although you're right - the topmost window's session history would need to be obtained each time. oh, what did this mean: "that shouldn't be too hard (he says cuz he doesn't have to write code)?" wasn't sure if you were referring to me or not? :) In any case, this problem is even more widespread-- downloading something from an FTP (in my case, the latest nightly) and then restarting (with the pref already on, of course) causes moz to again load the FTP page and gives the user the standard save dialog, even more potentially confusing (and scary) to a user who's just starting up the browser. How could we prevent this if we were to go with the session history idea? The only feasible way I can think of is to have the browser check the last visited URL it has stored upon loading...if it appears to be a file to download, about:blank would be displayed instead? or perhaps the home page?
the 'he' who doesn't have to write code is me :-) the FTP download thing is a filed session history bug
handing this over to claudius for qa --if this turns out to be a problem w/prefs, feel free to pass it back to me.
QA Contact: sairuh → claudius
Reassigning as per Don
Assignee: matt → radha
Component: Preferences → History
Keywords: nsbeta2
Target Milestone: --- → M17
Putting on [nsbeta2+] radar for beta2 fix.
Whiteboard: [nsbeta2+]
Ok. This is now in my plate. After going thro' everybody's opinion, this is what I think. 1) Going to a simple page in the browser and restarting, brings up the browser with the page you were. This is correct and as observed by S.E.V. Liberman. 2) Have the sidebar search panel open, do some search with results in the right frmae. Restarting now brings up the browser with the search panel open and teh previous search results in the right frame. I think this is also the right behavior. 3) Open the mail reader, with the default mail page showing up and restart, this brings up the browser with the default mail page. I think this is wrong. Even if you read a email thro' messenger and then restart, the browser comes up with the mail default page. This is probably because, that is the last page recorded in global history. 4) Regarding downloading a file thro' ftp and restarting, There is already a bug that says file download s'd not be recorded in SH. I'm not sure if file download dialog is recorded in Global history. Once that is fixed, if you restart after downloading a file, the last page you visited just before downloading will show up. You won't download the file again. Does everybody agree on the above? It looks to me it is only #3 tha needs to be addressed. Please comment so that I can look in to the matter. Earlier comments were little confusing.
Move to M18 target milestone.
Target Milestone: M17 → M18
radha: I agree that prior comments have been a bit confusing; thanks for the summary. You're right, it appears now that the third issue you mentioned is the only one that has to be addressed. resummarizing to reflect this
Summary: Start with Last Page Visited pref logs/loads wrong pages → Start with Last Page Visited pref loads default mail page
no, no, no. The one thing being overlooked are sidebar url's of the form, http://sidebar.mcom.com/sidebar/foobar (the news panel for instance uses these, but it could just as easily be urls the cnn panel, which constantly updates, uses) Sidepanels - not just the search panels - access all sorts of urls, and load them in the panel itself. These urls get into global history. The pref pulls the last page from Global History. If it so happens that the last page to load was a a sidebar url *that got loaded in the sidebar* not the content window - this url is nonetheless displayed in the browser content window on startup. This is the reason why I suggested the pref should pull the 'last visited page' valus from the session history instead. All of the work has already been done to filter out all of the wrong/bad/extra things from session history. I think pulling this last vistied value from SH much more closely approximates the user expectation.
Cladius: Sidebar urls should not get in to global history. It looks like if we fix that and make sure MN startup page don't get in to global history, we w'd fix this bug. I'm not keen on using SH for this purpose, because I'm afraid we will opening a new set of bugs with that.
ok. So I'll be watching for the Mail start page and url loads generated by sidebar panels to NOT go into Global history. Is this still your bug now or Waterson's?
Actually I would say this s'd be broken to 2 bugs, one for the MN startup page and the other for sidebar example, complete with clear steps to reproduce. The bugs to s'd be assigned to someone in respective teams, alecf or sspitzer for MN, slamm sidebar work.
OK. Let this stand for the MN page(please reassign as appropriate) and I'll write a bug for the sidebar issue.
I wrote bug 41287 to cover the sidebar issue
*** Bug 44096 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
It isn't just mail and the sidebar but also editor. It seems like all of these are being treated as "exceptions to the rule." Maybe the browser's global history isn't really "global?"
*** Bug 41287 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Status: NEW → ASSIGNED
Whiteboard: [nsbeta2+] → [nsbeta2+]Fix in hand. Being reviewed. ETA 7/17
Fix checked in.
Status: ASSIGNED → RESOLVED
Closed: 26 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
VERIFIED Fixed with 2000072608 builds
Status: RESOLVED → VERIFIED
Component: History: Session → Document Navigation
QA Contact: claudius → docshell
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