944561 - Form info is lost instantly when page refresh/timeout/or accident backspace

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[dustin.griffith33]

What feature should be changed? Please provide the URL of the feature if possible.
==================================================================================
leave page should prompt or form info should be stored
mozilla.org/*

What problems would this solve?
===============================
Loss of huge amounts of time when error occurs. 

Who would use this?
===================
Everyone who has ever made the mistake of hitting backspace when they didn't have the form field selected while they were trying to change some text.

What would users see?
=====================
    Either:
A) a dialog box when they try to leave page while info is in form 
    OR the better option
B) When they come back to the page after thinking all is lost the info they have entered is magically there again

What would users do? What would happen as a result?
===================================================
[1] Enter all the info on a page such as the bug report page I am on now.
[2] Go to change some text and hit backspace without first selecting the field
[3] Get really **** that they have lost all the info they just spend 20 minutes typing in
[4] Go back to the page and... "Wow. It's still there".
[5] Be really pleased

Or they could just be prompted before they leave the page but why punish those who are actually trying to leave a page every time they decide to.

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================
I was thinking you could just save the form info to cookie in onbeforeunload but that may not work in every situation so it may be best to periodically save the form info into a cookie. Maybe a 10 minute cookie. Then once the form has successfully submitted it's response would clear that cookie. This was found in my first experience with mozilla.org. I use MDN all the time so I thought I would setup an account and it happened while I was change my profile because I clicked outside the textarea and hit backspace. Then I filled this whole page out a lot better than I did this time around and the internet went out for 3 minutes so my form submission timed out. This would greatly improve user experience. Thanks.

Comment 1

[ali spivak]

This unfortunately is an issue with web forms, not specific to MDN