604295 - Show each visit (instead of just the last visit) in History

Status: REOPENED

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Filipus Klutiero]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100916 Iceweasel/3.6.10 (like Firefox/3.6.10)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100916 Iceweasel/3.6.10 (like Firefox/3.6.10)

I use Show All History to estimate how much time I spent doing what during the day. For example, if I opened https://bugzilla.mozilla.org at 1:00 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=xxxxxx at 1:10, I probably spent about 10 minutes filing xxxxxx.

There is one important problem with the History Library doing that: a URL is only showed once. So for example, if I filed 2 issue reports today and xxxxxx was the first, I wouldn't see the 1:00 access to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org in the Library. Instead, there is a Visit Count and a Visit Date for each URL, but this doesn't really help in my use case. It's worth noting that showing a "Visit Date" for several visits is wrong, this should probably read "Last Visit Date".

I would like to be able to show all visits individually, optionally.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Filipus Klutiero]

About the buggy display of URL-s visited several times, see also #497202.

Comment 2

[Filipus Klutiero]

"Visit Date" now reads "Most Recent Visit" (see issue 381519). While issue 497202 was merged with 381519, they are not the same.

This ticket requests one of the possible solutions to the problem reported in 497202. The other solution is to only consider visits in the relevant period to compute "Most Recent Visit". It seems to me that either all visits should be shown, always, or implementing this feature is insufficient (we also need to ignore visits outside the relevant period when a single visit per URL is shown).

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

you probably want to make an add-on for your use-case and examine the visits asynchronously from it. I don't think we are going to fix most recent visit to be in the search timeframe, since that's a quite expensive calculation we can't pay atm. Maybe in future things may change so that it's feasible, but not now.

Comment 4

[BMO Automation]

Per policy at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bug_Triage/Projects/Bug_Handling/Bug_Husbandry#Inactive_Bugs. If this bug is not an enhancement request or a bug not present in a supported release of Firefox, then it may be reopened.

Comment 6

[Dinar]

this can be optional. grouping visits of same url maybe good for some usage, because it probably makes history look more simple

Comment 7

[Russell Haley]

If there is no intention to fix this bug, all of the "History" UI ought to be re-labeled as "last visited URLs" or something, because as currently implemented Firefox does not record browsing history.

Comment 8

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to Russell Haley from comment #7)

If there is no intention to fix this bug, all of the "History" UI ought to be re-labeled as "last visited URLs" or something, because as currently implemented Firefox does not record browsing history.

Firefox records each visit, as visible from the History Sidebar by picking "By Last Visit" view.
The Library column is named Most Recent Visit to avoid miscomprehension.

Comment 10

[gwarser]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [:mak] from comment #8)

...
Firefox records each visit, as visible from the History Sidebar by picking "By Last Visit" view.

I don't see this. My preferred view is sidebar sorted "By last visited" and I see only the most recent visit.

Comment 11

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Yeah sorry, we record all the visits, but there is no "all visits" view, all the views group by URI.
You could create a new bookmark with url place:type=1&sort=4&maxResults=100 to get a dynamic query with the last 100 visits.

Comment 12

[Ayman]

I'm interested in working on this

Comment 13

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

This is not currently actionable. While it's technically feasible, we need someone from Product/UX to evaluate and approve the change.
We can start an internal discussion about that, but most of the focus is currently in other parts of the browser, so it may take time.

Comment 14

[vetle.henrik]

Is there someone from Product/UX that one can contact? To start an internal discussion and to see if this change can be approved. There is an idea that is a couple of years old with 14 votes (as of now) asking for this change:
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/history-option-to-keep-all-visits-to-a-page-vs-latest-only/idi-p/13058

Comment 15

[vetle.henrik]

It can be an added option for the "Show Columns" and "Sort" in the Views menu in the Library window

Comment 16

[vetle.henrik]

A possible name for the option could be "Chronological Visit"