74537 - history is inaccurate in showing browsing activity

Status: VERIFIED WORKSFORME

(Core Graveyard :: History: Global, defect)

Description

[jkng]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; 0.8.1)
BuildID:    2001040204

If you don't use the browser for a couple of days, only one day shows up
blank/with no urls in the history when there should be two empty date folders. 

Reproducible: Didn't try
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Don't use mozilla  for a couple of days. 
2.Open history or history sidebar
(*May not occur everytime. Just happen to notice it the past couple of weeks.)

Actual Results:  Observe how many days are empty, there should be two but only
one will show up as empty/without urls.

Expected Results:  accurately show no urls in the history for days browser was
inactive.

Comment 1

[Claudius Gayle]

reporter, this will take a while to repro but I'll try. I suggest you give the following method
a try as well and maybe one of us will see it again. Rather than not use mozilla for several
days, create a new profile and use it for a couple days and then stop. Then we can look at that
profile's history.

Comment 2

[timeless]

I think this is invalid.  I think that for dates where there is no history, 
there should be no folder.

Claudius: you could change the date on your system (windows lets you do this as 
long as it isn't syncing against a time server)

Comment 3

[jkng]

I like [e-mail]'s idea about not showing folders for days with no 
history. That way yo

I'll probably wipe out my moz profiles & registry files and start fresh. Maybe 
that will fix the issue. I don't use moz over the weekends so I'll check the 
history again next week.

Also, it would be great if you could single click the folder icon to open the 
date's history. Right now, you can single click the arrow but you have to double 
the folder to open the date's history.

Comment 4

[Claudius Gayle]

d'uh. i guess I could just change the system date. Timeless, re invalidity, you've missed the
point. The reporter said there is one empty folder and one missing folder for 2 days of no
history. There should either be 2 missing or 2 empty no?

Comment 5

[Alec Flett]

file a seperate bug about not having folders for which there is no history...
it's a hard bug to fix and I'm not going to fix it for mozilla 1.0.

there's already a seperate bug about single-clicking to open a history link in
the sidebar, we can just extend that bug to open folders as well. However, that
too is another bug.

Also, the folders are grouped by particular days, where the break happens at
midnight, local time. this means that if you view a page at 12:03am on monday
night/tuesday morning, and today is wednesday, then "yesterday" will have a
child... that's the way it works. I'm pretty sure this bug is invalid...

Comment 6

[jkng]

Ok, i understand the concept (at least I think I do). However, in my case, I
stopped using the browser sometime around 7pm in the evening on friday and
didn't use the browser until monday morning say about 9am.  I would think that
you would get two empty folders - one for saturday and one for sunday (with
sunday's folder being called "yesterday" and saturday's folder called "2 days
ago") not one empty folder. 

Comment 7

[Claudius Gayle]

Alec, is there always a yesterday no matter what?(even if its empty?)

I think that would explain all of this: Two real days of no browsing, 1 nonexistent folder-
the folder for '2 days ago' which is in line with the current implementation, and 1 empty
folder - '1 day ago' or 'yesterday'. If the code was such that there was always a yesterday
that would explain things and maybe make this invalid. Otherwise you're looking at a bona
fide bug.

Comment 8

[Alec Flett]

yes, that is what you should have gotten. but I'll need more information: which
folder ("yesterday" or "2 days ago") was non-empty? What were the "Last Visited"
dates on the entires in that non-empty folder - were they from monday? sunday?
saturday? friday?

Comment 9

[jkng]

Sorry, I can't be certain, because I deleted my moz registry files, profiles, 
and any moz related files several hours ago thinking this might fix the 
problem. I'll have to try this again this monday to see if this fixed it.  Kind 
of hard not to use it during the week.

However,if I remember correctly, on monday when i checked, the "yesterday" 
folder was empty and the "1 day ago" had history files from friday. 

Comment 10

[jkng]

Don't know if clearing all my moz registry files, profiles, etc up or using a
new build (2001040504) fixed it, but the problem seems to have been resolved.
Now seeing two empty folders for two days of inactivity as expected.

Comment 11

[Keyser Sose]

Marking WORKSFORME as per reporters comments. 

Comment 12

[Alec Flett]

one thing I'm really really curious about now is if there was something about
last weekend, since two important things happened:
1) in the US, it was daylight-savings time in most states
2) we changed months from saturday to sunday

not to mention sunday was april fools day :)

Comment 13

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

mass-verifying WorksForMe bugs which haven't changed since 2001.12.31.

set your search string in mail to "EmperorLondoMollari" to filter out these
messages.