77935 - [RFE] make autocomplete from global history optional

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: Location Bar, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Matthew Miller]

I find the autocomplete feature very useful, but filling it with everything from
the global history is too much of a good thing -- the 'potential match' list
gets so long that it's useless.

I understand that some people want the new behavior, but please make it optional.
It'd be nice to also have the old behavior of only remembering urls which were
explicitly typed into the location bar.

Comment 1

[Jonas Sicking (:sicking) No longer reading bugmail consistently]

IE fills the autocomplete-automatic-dropdown with all visited links, but the 
list shown when clicking the downarrow on the left is filled with only the most 
recently _typed_ links.

I'm not saying that it is good or bad, just saying that that is how IE does 
it...

Comment 2

[blockcipher]

As I stated in bug 43189, I also think this would be best as an option.  I
prefer the old way much more since I have more control over what matches and
what doesn't.  When developing, for example, I'll have links that I want in my
location bar history.  These are typically the root directories of where I'm
working.  It was very annoying to sift through a lot of possible matches to find
them.  In the old system, I sifted through 8 possible matches, which is a lot
less than in the new system.  An option would give us the best of both worlds. 
The big question is, which should be enabled by default: old or new?

Comment 3

[Alec Flett]

While I agree, I think it's more important to make the list sort in a more
relevant way... so I'm keeping the priority low on this one with the hopes that
we'll get some better sorting soon.

Comment 4

[timeless]

*** Bug 80689 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[R.K.Aa.]

*** Bug 83108 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Scott Tran (Wildcard)]

*** Bug 79036 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Paul Chen]

nav triage team:

Not a mozilla0.9.3 stopper, marking mozilla1.0

Comment 8

[Keyser Sose]

*** Bug 88655 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[Paul Chen]

nav triage team:

We should fix autocomplete to work better. Pushing out to mozilla1.2

Comment 10

[Alec Flett]

reassign url bar bugs to new owner..

Comment 11

[sami.makinen]

I hope that changing the target milestone to undefined means somebody is working
on this. After all just adding the option somewhere should be an easy enough
task, and would bring immediate benefits. Improved sorting algorithms take a lot
of work and MAY bring some benefits. You probably can't make a sorting algorithm
that everybody would be happy about no matter how much you try.

As a sort of compromise, I propose a sorting algorithm with the following
priorities:
#1 links that the user has actually typed in, or recently or often visited links
#2 directories (e.g. list www.server.com and www.server.com/dir, but not
www.server.com/dir/file.html
#3 the rest of the history in alphabetic order

Comment 12

[Blake Ross]

Joe was dying to have these bugs. Who am I to say no?

Comment 13

[Joe Hewitt (gone)]

This pref already exists.  See Prefs > Navigator > Smart Browsing > Advanced

Comment 14

[Matthew Miller]

No it doesn't. :)

This bug asks for a choice between the new behavior of putting every page URL
you ever see into the autocomplete space, and the old (Netscape-Navigator-like)
behavior of only autocompleting URLs you've actually typed in the location bar
before.

Unless I'm missing something, the dialog you're pointing to has no such option.

Comment 15

[Blake Ross]

Attachment: patch

Comment 16

[Blake Ross]

I agree that better sorting is important, and intend to work on that soon.  I
still think this could be useful, so here's a patch.

If anyone is wondering, the discrepancy between the bool names
(mAutocompleteOnlyTyped vs. mMatchOnlyTyped) is because I wanted to clarify the
meaning of the former, since it belongs to nsGlobalHistory.  On that note, I
totally agree with bug 121139 that the autocomplete impl is becoming unwieldy
and should be split off.

This patch also adds a pref observer for the expiration pref.  We had the
relevant observation code in ::Observe, but as far as I can tell we never
actually registered the observer for this pref.

Comment 17

[Matthew Miller]

hey, nifty. thanks!

Comment 18

[Blake Ross]

alec/hewitt, looking for r/sr

Comment 19

[Alec Flett]

Comment on attachment 70030 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

that NS_LITERAL_STRING(PREF_*) is not going to compile on all platforms (like
linux, I think)
sr=alecf if you fix that up

Comment 20

[Blake Ross]

I think it will compile.  The case for the expiration pref changing uses that
syntax and it's already in the tree.

Comment 21

[Blake Ross]

Fixed.

Comment 22

[Blake Ross]

crap, I forgot to checkin the FE part of this, and the tree is closed now. I'll
do it tomorrow.

Comment 23

[Blake Ross]

Rest of the fix has been checked in.