669565 - FTP links appears visited even though the file has changed

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA]

Attachment: Screenshot of the issue

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:7.0a1) Gecko/20110704 Firefox/7.0a1

I downloaded the latest mozilla-central from the http://bit.ly/E12v on 4th of July. After the download, the link appear as visited, but when I go back to http://bit.ly/E12v one day after, the link from 5th of July also appear as visited even if i didn't visited/downloaded it.
This behavior applies for both Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04.  

Reproducible: always

Steps to reproduce:
1. Go to  Mozilla ftp link: http://bit.ly/E12v
2. Download the latest mozilla-central
3. After one day go back to the same Mozilla ftp and observe the link with the latest date.

Actual results:
The link with the latest date appear as visited even though the link from the previous day was downloaded.

Expected results:
The link with the latest date should appear as unvisited.

Comment 1

[Thomas Ahlblom]

So the expected behavior means that Firefox under some circumstances has to access maybe hundreds or thousands of links in order to find out if they have changed before showing them, or am I wrong?

Comment 2

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA]

Firefox should at least remember the creation date or the file size, even though it have the same name is a different file.

Comment 3

[Thomas Ahlblom]

But even if Firefox remembers the creation date or the file size that means it has to access the files before showing the links to them, no? How could Firefox otherwise determine whether the link is already visited according to your definition or not?

Comment 4

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

I see your point, but this would be a surprising amount of complex work, and make FTP links inconsistent with the rest of the web.

The link-visited color just means you've previously visited/downloaded/whatever that link. For example, a link to "http://cnn.com" would show as visited once you've been there, even though the content changes constantly. That would make link coloring basically useless and it would seem to randomly stop working based on hidden technical details of how a site runs.

To further my point, note that your screenshot (and actual site content) contains no actual ftp:// links. The server is called "ftp.mozilla.org", but it serves HTTP content! [Though you can actually access it via ftp:// as well.]