Comment by brigandish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brigandish | Hacker News Reader

Fix the terrible history page and I'll switch because it'll tell me that the dev team is prioritising the right things, existing, basic features over new, probably unwanted ones.

For a laugh, check out this bug[1] for the history page, extant since Firefox 11!, that means deletion is incredibly slow and tiresome. What makes me laugh even more is that history is stored in a SQLite database, meaning that deletion should be very easy and quick but they've decided to create some horrible extraction over the top that inevitably uses Javascript of some sort.

Just delete the stuff and refresh the page. Or don't, inform the user to close and reopen it themself, it would still be an improvement by a long way. Jesus wept, I know about Chesterton's Fence but how hard can this really be?

As this comment by a team committer shows, the direction of the product is wrongheaded and tells me all I need to know about why FF has fallen so far behind Chrome in market share:

> We understand this is still an issue, and we recognise that it is a pain point for people who do hit it. However, it likely involves a significant amount of non-trivial work to fix. At the moment our focus is on improving other areas of Firefox, and we don't have the time available to dedicate to this.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=734643

This appears to be a case of something that I've known as "the BBBB problem" - should we optimise algorithms that will rarely be used in a way that makes computation time explode?

I mean, who removes history entries by selecting thousands of them manually? Okay, this guy, but who else?

I don't remember who named it like that, but the associated anecdote was about typing "BBBB" somewhere in Excel(I think it was the function search input), and how unlikely it was to ever happen.

Personally I've pasted the wrong thing into search bars more than once and they exhibit a range of behaviours.

"who removes history entries by selecting thousands of them manually? Okay, this guy, but who else?" Me too. When I read the first guy's comment I was like "Goddam it's not just me"

I use the example as the opposite of a canary in a coalmine, a good omen, some way to divine good attitude and thus, good things to come. If I wanted to point to areas where Mozilla have clearly wasted effort that would be easy enough, the comments and submissions to HN are littered with them. The point is that there are basic functions in the browser that are ignored while these other - shall we call them debacles, because that's what they tend to end up as - are released and pilloried or ignored.

Hence, to see something like this be fixed would be a sign that developer time is going into the core product. It could be anything else more fundamental than whatever I've seen announced by Mozilla lately.

> I mean, who removes history entries by selecting thousands of them manually? Okay, this guy, but who else?

I’ve often done it to clear out useless repetitive history entries that are just clogging up results when typing in the address/search bar. Ideally it would simply not make entries for some kinds of redirects and I could define rules of URLs to exclude, but in the absence of that I might just go through once or twice a year and delete a few of the biggest repetitive patterns. And how slow it’s been for the last decade has been rather frustrating at times. I just tried deleting a couple of thousand (I use Nightly, where a fix apparently landed last week) and it took half a second, which is much more relaxing than the ten or twenty seconds of full-blocking CPU thrashing that it used to be.

I do understand what you mean, and in general I agree, but in this specific example making it faster doesn't require "optimizing" anything! If I am understanding correctly the "naive" algorithm here is the fast one, so it takes more effort to make it slow than it does to make it fast.

Mozilla has landed a partial fix for this[1], which is currently on the nightly branch and should be available with 108.

[1] https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/04e6abff2792

Oddly enough, selective history deleting is absolutely awful in Safari (16.*?) as well.

Like bookmarks, history is an underrated and under-served feature.

Javascript? In my browser? It's more likely then you think.

Pray tell why Javascript should be involved in the deletion of history entries from a SQLite database in an app distributed as a binary that is largely written in Rust.

I know the answer, because it's UI update code. I don't fucking care about the fancy UI updates, delete the entries and get out of my way. Javascript in most websites is obnoxious enough, in a browser it had better be good or it's beyond obnoxious, much like your reply.

Firefox is largely written in Javascript and a bit of C++.

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