GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 306725
History contents should be continuously updated according to time interval
Last modified: 2017-08-14 20:23:53 UTC
When the history window is open and the time interval displayed is 'last 30 minutes', what's actually shown is the history contents of the last 30 minutes at the time that the interval was selected. It would make sense to update the history contents each minute instead, when the meaning of 'last 30 minutes' has changed. Same thing for 'Today' etc.
Tricky, you end up with a volatile selection then. Basically imagine your 30 minutes was up, you were /just/ about to click a link you visited 30 minutes ago - and then it disappeared... Not entirely sure what the solution is, but turning a blind eye to this doesn't seem like /that/ bad an idea. :P
The solution for that particular problem may be to simply defer updating the list when the history window has gained focus in the past minute or so?
Still valid.
Reinout: I agree with Alex, I don't think that dissapearing stuff from the list would be a good idea. I can think that the most common use case is to check a website you just closed some minutes ago. OTOH, if you say a use case would be always knowing what's the last stuff you have seen then you either have a 1 minute memory or you are pretty much a self-monitoring freak (and if you are suck a freak, you can always make an extension for this, actually it sounds far better as a sidebar thing than as another window). I say turning a blind eye is not a bad idea.
Alex' scenario is a bit far-fetched and my suggestion in comment #2 would take care of that. It's just not right that when you have the history window open in the background (possibly for multiple days) and you want to use it again, the time indications are incorrect and some visited sites don't show up. You shouldn't have to close and reopen the window again to be able to use it.
Ignore that part about "some visited sites don't show up." Items are in fact added to the history at each URL visited.
Reinout: couldn't we just update the list according to the interval when the history window gains focus? That way, we would not waste resources updating in background when not needed and we would also solved what is described in comment #3.
I meant comment #1, sorry :)
@Cosimo: if we update the list on gaining focus, then suddenly disappearing entries, described by Diego, *will* happen. I'm not convinced by the 'wasting resources in the background' argument either. The model has to be updated anyway. If the history window (the view) doesn't have focus then it could update lazily / at low priority if performance is a concern. Speaking of performance, this functionality would probably benefit from the sqlite based history/bookmarks backend...
The history dialog changed since then and the “last 30 minutes” is not used anymore, making this request irrelevant.