Subject: Re: bug#19662: 24.4: history bloat and navigation trouble

From: Boruch Baum <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 02:09:29 -0500

On 01/24/2015 09:47 PM, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> Boruch Baum <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
>> Whenever I use the 'r' or 'l' keys in eww-mode, to eww-forward-url or
>> eww-back-url in the history list, the size of the history increases.
>> This seems to me to be wrong. Also, this behaviour seems to make it
>> impossible (for me, at least) to traverse the entire history this way,
>> unless I do so in a straight sequence (eg. all eww-back-url without ever
>> using eww-forward-url).
> 
> The eww history navigation is, er, original, but it's trying to solve
> the problem of "how do I get back to the page I saw just a few minutes
> ago".
> 
> If you're on page A, then moves to B, then moves back to A, and then
> moves to C, then getting back to B in eww is <back>, <back>.  Because
> that's the page you saw two pages ago.
> 
> In Firefox, if you do the same, <back> will get you to A, and then
> there's no more <back>, and you can never visit B by either going back
> or forward.
> 
> And it seems to me like your proposed change would have the same effect.
No. What ends up happening is that the sequence of the history list is
preserved, so you can always go back to B. It has the advantage of
reducing bloat, and if one scrolls through history much, that bloat can
be great.

I can see two uses for a history:
1] a log of the sequence in which pages were visited;
2] a list of visited places, in original sequence order.

For me, #2 is far and away more useful.

One problem with the current eww implementation is that once one does
something like A B C D C B, it becomes difficult to get to E using
commands l/r
> 
> If anybody has a better way of registering the history (that still
> wouldn't "forget" B, like Firefox does), I'm all ears.
> 

-- 
hkp://keys.gnupg.net
CA45 09B5 5351 7C11 A9D1  7286 0036 9E45 1595 8BC0