Created attachment 31562 [details] [review]
untested, backend-only patch

Mass reassigning of Epiphany bugs to epiphany-maint@b.g.o

<chpe> why not completely disable history there ? (we have a lockdown setting
for that)

the lockdown option is not usable, because you cant use the back-buttons. for
example you search with google, click on one of the results, but this was not
what you searching for. now you cant click back :-/

possibility setting history lifetime is a good step and has also advantages for
most user. e.g i would prefer a higher bookmark save time, like one month.

but for internet cafes (i am admin of one) a session based history would be
perfect. if you close the epiphany window or the last window it forgets the history.

of course this icafe options should be only in gconf, because they are not
interesting for every user and shouldnt exploit the preferences.

*** Bug 148397 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

chpe, do we want to move forward on this? should we get the opinion of a UI guy?

Yes, I think we should ask a UI guy.

cc'ing clarkbw for UI guidence...

From what I've observed most icafe's use what Keywan was describing where they
lockdown settings by the session and not by the time.  User's pay for a session
of use of the computer and then all evidence of their use is discarded after the
session is over.

People using their computer for personal reasons don't actually want an
expiration date on their history.  I'm guessing we do it for space or speed
concerns.

If the space/speed concerns are true one thing to note of course is that if the
default is changed to some kind of session based pruning it will probably get
busted with laptop users who really only ever suspend their machines.

> I'm guessing we do it for space or speed concerns.
Speed, mostly. The history view used to be very slow with large number of items.
I'm going to try to check if that's still the case with gtk+ 2.6.

Maybe we should limit the number of entries rather than the time they persist?
Say, ~5-10k entries max. ?

Sounds like a good plan.  Sorry for not getting back to this.

The history is still very slow. With a full history, the history window takes 12(!) seconds to open on my 1.8 GHz Athlon XP.

There is also a speed hit when creating new windows and, I think, tabs; I can't test that conclusively however since I didn't save my history before wiping it to confirm the history window observation (oops!)

Limiting the number of entries sounds like a better idea than limiting in time. Launch Ephy, close it, wait 2 weeks (or go on holidays, or use another computer), and then your history is completely empty.

Wouldn't it be possible to load the history progressively to avoid the long time for the dialogue to show up?

Limiting the size rather than time should be easy to fix, look in embed/ephy-history.c .

The history dialogue being slow is on account of the sorting of the treeview... progressively loading won't speed that up any.

What about progressively loading in chunks? The trade-off between speed and responsiveness is a hard decision, but it's not really about the exact speed, but rather the "noticed" speed.

So, do we want a configurable (through which tab of Preferences?) max. number of history items? If so, shall I try and implement it?

This can't be done right now, since it depends on the new history backend from SoC (the current backend is too slow with larger history db).

cc'ing Imran.

Now the history is infinite. We are no longer humans. We are gods.

Limited only by our capacity to arrange the atoms that comprise the hard drives upon which the history is stored.