840937 - about:newtab does not create browser history entry

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 776167

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[braden.sim]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:18.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0
Build ID: 20130201065344

Steps to reproduce:

Use about:newtab as browser homepage (I prefer this speed-dial page to the default home) - but for that matter one can simply visit about:newtab.


Actual results:

On clicking a speed-dial site, then deciding you want to go to a *different* favourite, the instinct is to click 'back' to return to speed-dial. This works well for instance in IE, Chrome and Opera.

Unfortunately in FF visiting about:newtab creates no history entry at all. Bizarrely it appears to be the only one of the 'about:' pages displaying this behaviour.

If about:newtab is your homepage, starting up and clicking through to a site leaves the back button disabled, with no history entry - one must click 'home' to get back.

If you visit about:newtab in the course of browsing, click through to a site, then click back, the browser skips newtab and return to the preceding history entry.


Expected results:

about:newtab should create a history entry as per every other page, local or otherwise.

I suspect this behaviour is (was) intentional new tab behaviour - but it is counter-intuitive and very annoying, and should be changed if at all possible.