619678 - Improve UX of Back-Button by avoiding the "send POST again"-dialogue

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 160144

(Core :: DOM: Navigation, enhancement)

Description

[Tobias]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; de; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/3.6.12
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; de; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/3.6.12

The Problem: 
Every time I click the back-button to get back to a search result that has been send by POST I get this annoying modular dialogue asking me, if I want to send my data again.

This is wrong for a number of reasons:
- the user cannot understand what the problem is and consequences are but has to make a decision
- the modular dialogue is anoying
- it breaks my usage-flow
- it unnecessary in most of the cases

The Solution:
It would be best for the user's UX not to have such a dialogue at all. 

Solution 1: POST without asking. Unfortunatelly we cannot do this (I suppose), because we cannot trust website owners to build their sites in a way that dont break by multible posts (like comments that are published twice…).

But Firefox can be much more intelligent in deciding, what to do in special situations. For example: There is no harm in sending a search-form again and again. So why ask the user?

Solution 2: Have a Checkbox "remeber for this website www.domain.de/search.html – So I as a pro user can check this box and be not to be bothered again about this on this specific page.

Solution 3: Check for page-names and post-variables. If they contain "search" or "q" (query) just send the POST again.

Solution 4: Like 3 but just show the page from the cache and dont ask. The search result is stil up to date in most cases.

Solution 5: Define some kind of meta-tag that allows site-owners to tell Firefox what to do (like "dont ask, just use cache" or "post each time the page is loaded" or…).

Solution 6:
/There are probably more and better solutions, so please add them./

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. go to some site that uses this kind of request – like http://eztv.it/search/ or something
2. search
3. go to a detail-page
4. use the back-button
5. there is the dialogue…  "To display this page, Firefox must send information that will repeat any action (such as a search or order confirmation) that was performed earlier" (or similar, according to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2505289/ctrlr-in-firefox-for-refreshing-page-and-its-problem-to-my-php-code)

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

This is a duplicate.  Please find the original (which may well be in the Firefox product, since this is a UI issue), and mark this duplicate.

Comment 2

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

Had searched a few times but hadn't come up with anything. After 15 mins of trying different keywords, finally found it!

The bug this has been made a dupe of is potentially a future meta bug, so see bug 160144 comment 206 for a breakdown of the smaller components of the issue.

Comment 3

[Tobias]

Thanks for finding the duplicat – I just couldnt find it…