502418 - Support canonical URL with one-click bookmarking

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

When a user clicks the star icon in the location bar, Firefox should bookmark (or suggest bookmarking) the canonical URL provided by the visiting page.

This feature will be helpful both to users and publishers. They don't want URLs with tracking tags to be bookmarked. Consider AdWords conversion tracking or custom campaigns.

Steps to Reproduce

1. a user visits http://www.getfirefox.com/
2. s/he gets to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/upgrade.html?from=getfirefox 
3. a user clicks the star icon

Actual Results

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/upgrade.html?from=getfirefox will be bookmarked.

Expected Results

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ should be bookmarked (if the site provides canonical URL; see Bug 481550 for implementing on mozilla.com)

Comment 1

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

See http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps for details on canonical URL.

Hatena Bookmark, an add-on released by Japanese most popular social bookmark service, suggests canonical URL when a user click its Bookmark This Page button.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11285

Comment 2

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

How exactly would we know what the canonical URL is for an arbitrary site?

Comment 3

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

Would you like to see a real example? 

1. Subscribe a RSS feed on CNET:
http://news.cnet.com/2547-1_3-0-20.xml

2. You'll find an interesting article then click such a link:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10277114-92.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

3. This page's canonical URL is
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10277114-92.html

You can find it in the page source:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10277114-92.html" />

4. Click the star icon. Firefox will immediately bookmark
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10277114-92.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Yes, my idea is that Firefox should bookmark 
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10277114-92.html

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

see also bug 327024

ideally we couls look into recent redirects and get the original address, not sure if that's what we want though. We end up bookmarking something different from what the user sees. but at the same time we lose "site features" like automatic redirects based on platform/locale.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

confirming for brainstorming.

Comment 6

[Oliver Henshaw]

See also bug 777799

Comment 7

[Robert Rothenberg]

+1 for this

Note that the canonical URL is not supposed to return anything different for the user. It's intended to indicate the official URL to get to that page for search engines, social media, etc. 

I think when bookmarking, if there is a canonical URL, Firefox should, if the canonical URL is different, show a dialogue to choose either the canonical URL or the exact one.

It would probably make sense for the dialog to simply ask for a title and have a "More" button to choose the folder, tags, and URL. 

I note that Chrome currently behaves like Firefox and bookmarks the current URL vs the canonical one.

Comment 9

[Robert Rothenberg]

I think there may be some overlap with Bug 8648

Comment 10

[Robert Rothenberg]

For what its worth, I've released a Firefox add-on For what it's worth, I've just released the following Firefox add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refresh-your-bookmarks/ that will suggest you update your bookmark when you visit a page with a different canonical URL.