821354 - history incorrect sorting

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 381519

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Ed]

Attachment: Screenshot showing pages visited in december showing up in the november bin.

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Firefox/17.0
Build ID: 2012111600

Steps to reproduce:

Open the history dialog in Firefox.  (Firefox Button -> History -> Show All History).  The entries are categorized into simple calendar dates (today, yesterday, last 7 days, November, October, etc).


Actual results:

The pages are placed in these bins incorrectly.  Pages that were visited (once or most recently) in some month (e.g. October) are placed in the incorrect (e.g. today) bin.  The pages seemed to be placed in the bins mostly correctly but it is not difficult to find cases of incorrectly placed pages.


Expected results:

The pages visited most recently in some month should be placed in the bin for that month.  More generally speaking.  The pages that have been visited at some point in time should be placed in the bin corresponding to that time period.  Conversely, pages viewed most recently during some time should not be placed in bins corresponding to other times.

Comment 1

[[:Aleksej]]

Possibly related: bug 774168, bug 603002.

Comment 2

[Tyrone Chong]

Hey  What does unconfirmed mean? Is this bug valid?

Comment 3

[Tyrone Chong]

I was wondering if I can pick up this bug and tackle it for a project for school. We need to take a bug and fix it and in order to get full credit, our patches need to get approved.

Comment 4

[[:Aleksej]]

(In reply to Tyrone Chong from comment #2)
> Hey  What does unconfirmed mean? Is this bug valid?

Follow the link “Status” near “UNCONFIRMED”.

Comment 5

[Virgil Dicu [:virgil] [QA]]

(In reply to Tyrone Chong from comment #3)
> I was wondering if I can pick up this bug and tackle it for a project for
> school. We need to take a bug and fix it and in order to get full credit,
> our patches need to get approved.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Developer_Guide/How_to_Submit_a_Patch
You'll find the basic steps to submit a patch there. For starters, you should contact the module owner or a developer who is familiar with the code you want to tackle.
If nobody answers here, IRC is the place to ask for details (#introduction or #developers channel).
https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC

Comment 6

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

The problem here is just the column label is misleading.

Comment 7

[Ed]

Attachment: Showing this is not a misleading column but rather incorrect programming.

This bug is not a misleading column name.  It is not a duplicate of any bug that claims "visit data" is misleading.  Under either interpretation of the column name the data items (history entries) are incorrectly sorted.

If the column "visit date" means "most recently visited" then items most recently viewed in February should not show up in the January bin.

If the column "visit date" means "original visit data" then items visited originally in Feb. should not be showing up in the January bin.

The only situation in which I would say the sorting of history items is "correct" is the following.  The bin (in the treeview on the left) called "January" refers to history items that were originally visited in January (on first visit) and the column "visit date" actually means "most recent visit date."  In this case, it is conceivable (probable) that history items were created in january, visited again in February and now show up as Feb. dates in the Jan. bin.  However, this is clearly stupid and will do nothing but confuse the user.

Make the interface consistent with itself.  This is the problem.  The treeview says the history item is from jan, the visit date claims it's from feb.

Comment 8

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to Ed from comment #7)
> The only situation in which I would say the sorting of history items is
> "correct" is the following.  The bin (in the treeview on the left) called
> "January" refers to history items that were originally visited in January
> (on first visit) and the column "visit date" actually means "most recent
> visit date."  In this case, it is conceivable (probable) that history items
> were created in january, visited again in February and now show up as Feb.
> dates in the Jan. bin.  However, this is clearly stupid and will do nothing
> but confuse the user.

This is exactly what happens, and why we are going to rename Visit Date to Last Visit Date. Fixing it otherwise is non-trivial amount of work with clear performance issues involved and thus wontfix so far.