In Mozilla, as in Communicator 4.7, if a page is loaded in a new window via the context menu or javascript, the new browser window that the page appears in will have nothing at all in its Session History, just as if it were the first window after launch. This creates a useability problem if the user closes the first window before, upon reading the contents of the new window, deciding to bookmark the wonderful site that led to such a useful page (this isn't an academic scenario, I've seen it happen). In more general terms, the connection to the referring page is totally lost, which doesn't help for those unfamiliar with hypertext navigation. As a help to them, being able to back out to the previous page makes sense. This RFE is filed as an alternative to bug 18808, "Spawned windows should inherit back button/go menu history" (all of it), which, according to the reporter of bug 22721, is what IE does. But by doing this, the "beginning point" for a new window is no longer rooted: after further navigation in the new window, there is no obvious indication of what the first page in the new window was. This proposal fixes that problem by preloading only the immediately previous page into the new window's session history, giving context without an open-ended history.

I agree each window should be rooted in it's own session history, however all windows are linked to the same 'persistent' history (the one you get with Ctrl- H). Forwarding to Don/ XPApps

Hmmmm. Y'know I don't really care for the IE behavior. The 4.7 behavior is actually more "natural" or "logical" in the sense that a window's session history is empty at the moment of creation. I mean, isn't that what a session is? I believe the concept of a session is married to the existenace of a window. I don't really like the idea of pre-loading a new window with the previous page's session history. What does "previous" mean? The previously created window? The last active window? That's not path to an intuitive behavior. But feel free to argue with me. :-)

First, this bug is not asking for the entire session history of the "previous" window - that is bug 18808. This RFE is asking for only for the immediately previous page, the one that a new window is spawned from, to be preloaded into the session history of that new window. This is a compromise between the open-ended history in each window asked for by bug 18808 (also the IE behaviour), and the complete lack of context provided by NN 4.7 and earlier for how a page in a new window was reached. Not all pages in new windows are by the user's choice, some are as a result of TARGET=, and in this case the user may well wish to be able to return to the page from whence the new page was whelped. If neither this proposal nor the proposal in 18808 are implemented, another way for the user to "get back where I came from" would be to add a final item to the "Go" menu, called "More...", which would bring up the same dialog as "Tasks>Tools>History" ... too many people don't even know that's there. (Or perhaps a "Referer" item). (I should write this up as yet another RFE). I too, prefer a rooted view of the history, but I'd rather not give up the most cogent element of the History, the referer of the current page, to get it.

I'm exactly sure how session history handles redirects and the like, but what about those sites (you know which ones) that like to use a lot of redirects and javascript to spawn windows and effectively trap the user at the site. This would only exacerbate the situation. -or the case where the new window is superimposed on top of the previous window. Often the quickest visual indication that you have a new window and not just a new page is that fwd/back are deactivated. I can only see bad things happening here. given all that I would still like to see some way to know from where new windows were spawned.

Added, to address that last point independently of this RFE, bug 23926, "[RFE] Add "Referring Page" item to Go menu".

How would you like it if we disabled the back button to indicate the page has errors in it to web devlopers? You can still use the menu! This discussion is about important functionality that should not be disabled. If you want an indication of a new window, the status bar is there, and an RFE is waiting to be filed.

Given a choice between this plan and the one in bug 18808, I'd prefer that one but regaining one level of backtracking is better than nothing. Since Don asked for an argument, I'll oblige :-) To my mind, opening in a new window splits the session into two equal streams. Given that the only visual clue to distinguish the parent and child is the greyed-out back button (and that disappears if a new link is followed), to me it seems unituitive to have to keep track which of 5 identical looking CNN pages is the parent. A quick survey of my coworkers (n=4) supports this view.

This is as unintuitive as anything. Why back one page? What is the mental model or analogy you're using here? Why not back two, or five? Bug 18808 makes a whole lot more sense than this does, IMO.

Move to "Future" milestone.

*** Bug 59979 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Since Don has left, Vishy is taking his bugs in bulk, pending reassignment. thanks, Vishy

nav triage team: Would be nice, the problem is that mozilla can't reload the page from cache at the moment. Would suck for things like shopping where you just got confirmation of an order and want to open a new window... which reorders your stuff for you, whoops. Marking nsbeta1-, though we should probably add a dependency on the corresponding cache bug if there is one.

The Back history could be limited to a maximum of ten previously visited pages. You don't need to have the entire history at your disposal. For that, you have the History tab in My Sidebar.

Reassigning to a real person.

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state. If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way. If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar). If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state. Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state. If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way. If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar). If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state. Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state. If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way. If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar). If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state. Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state. If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way. If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar). If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state. Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state. If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way. If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar). If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state. Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state. If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way. If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar). If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state. Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state. If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way. If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar). If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state. Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

MASS-CHANGE: This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but still has no comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project 5 years ago. Because of this, we're resolving the bug as EXPIRED. If you still can reproduce the bug on SeaMonkey 2 or otherwise think it's still valid, please REOPEN it and if it is a platform or toolkit issue, move it to the according component. Query tag for this change: EXPIRED-20100420