Why is Firefox's history functionality so bad?

Why is Firefox's history functionality so bad?
What were they thinking?

Other urls found in this thread:

developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/history
ix.io/w6A
wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman/Rosetta
chrome.googleblog.com/2013/04/more-immersive-mobile-web.html
chrome.googleblog.com/2013/07/smarter-omnibox-suggestions-tailored-to.html
ghacks.net/2016/05/23/install-google-chrome-extensions-firefox/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

are you gonna explain what's wrong with it or is this just another banal shitposting thread?

It collapses all visits to the same url into one entry using the latest timestamp. You cannot view the the pages you visited in chronological order.
You can't limit the history by a date range using the built in history window.

install surf

Also the data is there but they don't properly expose it in WebExtensions API so you can't even make an extension to fix the shitty history.

They're bumbling about your history as they send it to various government databases.

>sort

What?

...

>defending the worst browser history on the market

WHAT????

Sorting doesn't fix the problem.

> a chrome fag

wut nigga

there must surely be some extension to fix your problem

possibly it is labeled sort?

it does

Why would I care about this if I used chrome?
Not since they forced everyone to use the WebExtension api. It doesn't have the right calls implemented.
No it doesn't, a single URL will still only show a single entry.

EMBRACE IT FAGS

>It doesn't have the right calls implemented.
developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/history

Will there ever be a history search like there was in Chrome 26 (last version based on webkit)?

It literally cached all the text on a website and searched it in the omnibar. I could close this tab here and enter 'embrace it fags' in the omnibar and chrome would find this thread and make it the topmost history suggestion.

Kids don't know this feel.

Read the docs user.
history.search() searches the HistoryItems which use the latest visit as the timestamp.
A proper history would allow you to show all VisitItems between t1 and t2, to do this using the current API you would have to get every HistoryItem then get their VisitItems each indivudually and filter them out based on their timestamps. This will be slow and eat up memory compared to simple JOIN it should actually take.
Ironically they have code that filters VisitItems by timestamp it's only used for history.deleteRange(), why didn't they expose it as history.searchVisits() or something? Who knows.

qutebrowser still does that

also install surf

The worst sin is that you have to use an add-on to avoid it deleting your history that's older than a few months. That shit can be invaluable at times, there is no reason to delete it when people are rocking terabytes of storage for 50 bucks these days.

You can just about:config it, but yeah it's retarded.

>you cannot view images you visited in chronological order
?

Look at entries with visit counts >1, they have been collapsed into a single entry.
If you viewed a youtube video on Jan 5 2017 and then on Oct 1 2017 the Jan entry will no longer show up.
This also results in annoying side effect that viewing history in timeline if you open any entry it will immediately be moved to the front of the history.
Just by clicking on all the links from a random day in the past it will now appear I didn't browse at all on that day!

I wonder if crims use this as a backup alibi.

>deleting your history that's older than a few month
mine goes 12+ months back
>not sure if shredded

bruh fix ur fonts
ix.io/w6A
if your freetype is 2.7+
dejavu is crap

Who in their right mind would use this browser?
Is this supposed to be a joke of some sort?

Also it's not true, pressing o opens the url bar, which does not search anything at all.

6/10, made me install bloat.

Why'd they remove it?

>if your freetype is 2.7+
how do i know halp
but also thankyou

You can type after 'o' to search the history.

i did this and now my letters on terminal seem equally spaced but blurrier
huh

pacman -Qi freetype
wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman/Rosetta

monospace [liberation mono] is great for that

also that possible redness is actually from the RGB setting in 10-baserendering but without it text can be blurrier

They switched the engine to blink and appearantly porting that was too much work.
The funniest bit was that 27 and 28 was advertised and celebrated as a big release, every tech news site was talking about it (even Sup Forums) because blink.
And the major focus of googles advertisements/change log for the 'new' browser was the 'new and revamped' omnibar. They claimed it was better because it implemented search suggestions and precaching an whatnot (wasn't really a thing before that - I know, hard to believe in 2018).
It was exactly the opposite: Worse (and quicker in rendering, admittedly, but that's worth jackshit with a high end PC).

Everything's fucked. Makes me real depressed thinking about how often I wished upon this feature since then.

Here's their retarded changelog from then:
chrome.googleblog.com/2013/04/more-immersive-mobile-web.html

>As another step towards simpler browsing, you can now see your search terms in the omnibox, instead of the long search URL and the in-page Google search box. This frees up room to view more search results and makes it easier to change your search terms.
It looked different afterwards.
Simply put: A meme manoveur to distract from dropping features.

Alright, fine, I'll give it a try. But that UI is definitely not for me.

There's apps to do this.

Actually no, that article is about mobile chrome.

chrome.googleblog.com/2013/07/smarter-omnibox-suggestions-tailored-to.html
Here we go, the actual omnibox shit they advertised in a literal sense.
Claimed to be better, was far worse.

I wish I knew them.

>on debian, sorry didnt specify. I tried it anyways and it worked.
>liberation mono
huh. that fixed pretty much every issue I had with terminal font(after fixing spacing I had a different one). Thanks!

fetching.io is one but it only supports local history on osx.

This could be fun project to work on.

Maybe if you're a brainiac that invented the google search algorithm

pic related, but thank you for sharing. much appreciated.
I'm sure we'll figure something out.

It doesn't seem too too bad, at least not single word search.
Not sure what best way to extract all meaningful text from page would be.

you can change the ui...

surf is still better though

that's why i posted the rosetta

I will consider it for a particularly weak computer in my collection. Might lead to something on there.

Installed ESR and it fucking works.

I'll buy. I'm dirt poor but this is inanely powerful to me.

I have no words to describe the amount of productivity I just earned. I literally still had chrome 27 installed, that's how desperate I was.

best post on Sup Forums between 2014-2018

That first hand on the left is so messed up kek, five fingers

>keeping history

>not keeping history

I'm sorry but litterally who cares about the history?

Why would you not want browser history?

>I don't personally find it useful therefore no-one finds it useful

Please never write software

Because he doesn't use it therefore he believes it to be useless.

Post css.

>keeping history

>not keeping history

>let's just make shit up lmao

It's not even that. Who cares about this issue (), and why? It's not like it isn't storing that URL, so you cant just click on all the times you've looked at furry CP and say to the feds "ah ha, federal gubermunt!"

While I admit that this flaw should be fixed, LITTERALLY WHO CARES?

Wow, it's almost like I may want to find a file on a domain I've been on many times before or something.

And you can.

Firefox has gotten progressively shittier over the past year

You asked "who cares about history", and then to me it appears that no, you can't do that.

What is even your argument anymore?

What's yours? there's s little search box on the history window. Just click on that and search the file name.

But that's missing the point. I may not always recall the filename, and if that's the case I should be able to search for, e.g. "pdf", except that if you've looked at many pdfs from that site it will now collapse them into a single entry with "Visit Count". Same happens if you only remember what domain it was from.

It's simply not a good tool.

I remember watching a video on my birthday. I also watched it a month later but I don’t remember that.
Now I want to find that video but I can’t search “YouTube” and limit date to be week around my birthday. Even if I could it still wouldn’t show up because that entry has been collapsed into the entry a month later.

It’s very natural to think of browser history as url time stamp pairs in chronological order reflecting my browsing at that date. That Firefox can’t support this is insane.

I don't see how other browsers are better in this regard. Surely if you put "pdf" into any other browsers history search box it wouldn't give any more details beyond the URL, the pages title, and a favicon.

Chrome doesn’t merge all entries with identical url.

I want to thank you for providing an actual argument.
I agree that this should be changed.

So you'd prefer to see two or three of every single URL when your trying to find one PDF?

Maybe Firefox should just record all the dates the user has visited a URL, with a nice little tick box for merging entries.

>Who in their right mind would use this browser?
>Is this supposed to be a joke of some sort?
It's aimed at people that use Vim, and are used to the keybindings. Vim keybindings tend to be very portable, so it's handy for people that prefer a keyboard driven interface, especially now that Mozilla cucked the add-on that added Vim keybindings.

It's also highly configurable via a .conf file.

>6/10, made me install bloat.
>bloat
I don't think you know what that word means.

>So you'd prefer to see two or three of every single URL when your trying to find one PDF?

I would prefer to see ALL pdfs I've ever looked at if I searched "pdf", preferably I would be able to do "pdf+domain.com"

Makes sense.

>especially now that Mozilla cucked the add-on that added Vim keybindings
I fucking hate the addon purge.
One of the worst things that ever happened to browsing as a poweruser.
Did you know that there is an extension that allows the new Firefox to install chrome extensions? Maybe chrome has an extension that would bring vim keybindings?

ESR will still work until august or some shit.
Then's doomsday.

>So you'd prefer to see two or three of every single URL when your trying to find one PDF?
Yes, or at least an option.
A browser history that can't display seperate visits to same URL and doesn't support time based queries is garbage.
>Maybe Firefox should just record all the dates the user has visited a URL
They do internally but the WebExtensions API has no nice way to query it.

>Did you know that there is an extension that allows the new Firefox to install chrome extensions?
Neat, what is it? I'd like to give it a try.

That being said, I'm not sure that would work for the Vim keybindings. There are definitely add-ons for Chrome that offer similar functionality to Vimperator, but the problem is (if I'm not mistaken) that Firefox's new retarded security model with regards to add-ons prevents certain functionality from ever being fully implemented (this is one of the problems that current Vimperator replacements on Firefox are having).

And yeah, fuck Mozilla through and through.

>Neat, what is it? I'd like to give it a try.
ghacks.net/2016/05/23/install-google-chrome-extensions-firefox/

Wasn't the whole point of moving WebExtensions so that Chrome extensions could seamlessly be ported?

Because you should have Opera and they know it.

XUL also forced FF to be mostly single-threaded.

Sure. That's what they said.

Firefox 57+ should also have been quicker than the classic Firefox. But when you install the same amount of extensions is just as slow (which is pissing me off).

I think it's worth nothing that the multithread option (up to 7 processes) in nu-Firefox makes it consume much more RAM than when having it set to use just 1 process.
Having 1 program use multiple processes didn't turn out as genius as it sounds.

>inb4 ramlet

>What were they thinking?

"Only faggots have a browser history."

>I think it's worth nothing that the multithread option (up to 7 processes) in nu-Firefox makes it consume much more RAM than when having it set to use just 1 process.
>Having 1 program use multiple processes didn't turn out as genius as it sounds.

I have 16GB of RAM, but I do agree. I don't think processes should eat all of that up just because they can. I have the same problem with Electron-based applications.

How much extra ram have you noticed it using?

few megabytes to 2 gigabytes extra with heavy usage.
It's not a problem though because setting it to use just 1 process fixes it. I did only notice extremely minor performance differences between 1 and 7, so I don't really care.

Main reason I like multiprocess is crappy JS no longer locks up entire browser.

For me it still does, so there's no difference.
Noticable when having lots of Sup Forums tabs open with the autoupdater enabled and scrolling using autoscrolling. Everytime the updater updates, the scrolling starts lagging (no matter how many processes).

Doesn't happen with no addons, but without addons I'd much rather use webkit or blink based browsers because of the better os integrity.

The new addons are being marketed as better but in reality it's just a rewrite because nobody could understand the old code. I'm not blaming them as iktf.

...

The worst part about firefox history is that it also obfuscates things.
Let's say I visit omegle.com, I view my history, I get figure A.

Then I right click omegle and delete it and in fact, I select "forget about this site", because I want to forget I ever visited that godforesaken site, so I get figure B. Should be good, right?

But when I type om into my url bar, omegle.com still autocompletes. If I seach my history for "om" omegle.com appears right at the top again, see figure C.

I have to delete it from there to really delete it from my history and URL-bar autocomplete, but it doesn't show up unless I explicitly search for it. Who thought this would be acceptable behavior?

install surf

What are you showing?

install tabbed surf -e

It's not that bad though

trips confirm and self check

it is though

>Firefox 57+
NO SCROLLING TEARING
O
N
E
but i use the one from mozila not arch

What's worse is their bookmarks, with which you need to dig way down into the menu to find your organized bookmark folder system.

>Space Jin image
>fucking moron
Checks out

Not OP, but there are times I want to know "when was the first time I went to this site" or "What was that site I know I went to on that particular day" or "how often did I go to that site in July" and such that I can't see with the current Firefox system.

How am I wrong?

This is a girls website, kindly fuck off

The lack of proper WebExtension API makes it painfully slow to implement this.
What should take