392844 - Places history doesn't contain a column for referer (referrer)

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement)

Description

[James Andrewartha]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8.0.13pre) Gecko/20070505 Iceape/1.0.9 (Debian-1.0.10~pre070720-0etch1)
Build Identifier: 

There's no column for referer(sic) in the places history implementation, while there was in the mork history. While only exposed in the SeaMonkey history UI, there's also a Firefox extension https://www.squarefree.com/extensions/high/ that uses this data.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Caio Tiago Oliveira (asrail)]

A enhancement, since it was not intended by the original implementation.

Comment 2

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Actually, I think it was intended, and I think this is a duplicate of bug 320831 (though you'd never know it to look) - referrers are stored in the historyvisit table, so for a given URL the database knows, for each time you've visited it, what the referring visit was (from which it can get to the referring URL), and what you did to get there (link click, bookmark, typed, redirected), there just isn't any interface to let you get at the data.

Comment 3

[John Abbe]

The "How'd I Get Here?" extension depends on this (it's a button you click on to go to the first web page from which you go to the page you're on). I'd hate to lose this by upgrading to FFox 3.

https://www.squarefree.com/extensions/high/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1196

Comment 4

[Brett Wilson]

There is no unique referrer for every page. The old history system stored the "last" one, but if you've visited the page many times, you could easily come from different places.

This information is in the database as the referrer for the visit. You can get the URL referrer by doing a join on the visit table. This allows to track unique referrers for each visit. It would be easy enough to add code to history to get the most recent referrer out of the database.

In some cases this information is not perfect. It should be slightly better than in Firefox 2. Any additional wrongness is a separate bug (also mentioned in bug 320831).

Comment 5

[Jesse Ruderman]

"How'd I Get Here" wants the oldest referrer rather than the newest, fwiw.

Comment 6

[James Andrewartha]

The old history system stored the first referrer. How do I know? I wrote the code that stored it.

Comment 7

[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