923829 - Page loaded but never appears in address completion neither in History

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: DOM: Navigation, defect)

Description

[Nicolas Barbulesco]

Firefox 23.0.1 Mac.

1. I am off-line. Because I have set Firefox to off-line mode in the File menu, or because I have turned off AirPort. Both give the same behaviour of Firefox.
2. In the tab A, I Apple-click on a link, to open the address B in the background. Firefox creates the background tab, but does not load the page. So far, so good. The consequence is that the page does not make its way into the History. I don't like this behaviour — Safari adds the off-line entry to the History, which is nicer —, but it can be understood.
3. I quit Firefox.
4. I relaunch Firefox. Firefox restores the session, without loading background tabs. My tab B is not loaded.
5. I turn on AirPort, and I set Firefox to on-line mode if he is not already so. I am now on-line.
6. I close my tab A. Firefox loads the tab B. The page B is now loaded.
7. I close the page B.

Here comes the big bug.

* Expected behaviour :

 - When I type a word of address B in the address bar, the address B comes in completion.
 - The address B has its entry in the History.

* Actual behaviour :

 - When I type a word of address B in the address bar, the address B does not come in completion.
 - There is no trace of address B in the History, even when filtering with one word of address B.

Depending on how one uses the History, this can mean data loss.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

It's actually something we do on purpose in the Docshell, these visits are not even passed to history, since what we are actually doing is loading a browser error page.
We could evaluate adding a failed visit, but would not be exactly correct from an hisotry point of view (you had the browser offline on purpose, it's not the page couldn't be loaded). That said if the behavior is common across browsers we can evaluate to cope with it.

Comment 2

[Nicolas Barbulesco]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [:mak] from comment #1)

> It's actually something we do on purpose in the Docshell, these visits are
> not even passed to history, since what we are actually doing is loading a
> browser error page.
> We could evaluate adding a failed visit, but would not be exactly correct
> from an hisotry point of view (you had the browser offline on purpose, it's
> not the page couldn't be loaded).

Marco, you speak about the cause problem : the *failed visit* not being added to the History. Safari does adds it to the History, and this is safer. Also note that the failure is not always on purpose ; the network or the server can be down…

But what I mainly describe in this issue is much more serious. It is a *successful visit* never being added to the History, neither to the address bar completion.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

not dataloss, by Marco's definition

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

This seems pointing at the fact pages restored from session restore are not added to global history. That's a longstanding decision that was taken a long time ago. It also has other consequences, like frecency of pages restored doesn't grow, and thus with time those pages fall down in the Address Bar even if they are opened every day.
This is likely a dupe of a bug tracking the above issue, and the decision should be taken there.
Moving to Document Navigation for now, since it's where global history is skipped.