[Bug] Restored tabs from collections show old cached content

[staktrace]

Steps to reproduce

I don't have concrete STR but I see this frequently, where I open Fenix and tap on a link to news.ycombinator.com in one of my collections. This is from a cold start, sometimes even after a device reboot, so it's definitely not Fenix sticking around in the background.

Expected behavior

Page opens with latest version.

Actual behavior

Page opens with the same content I was seeing last time I opened the page, typically a day or two previously. My assumption is that the page is fresh but after a reading a few headlines I get suspicious because they all look familiar. I reload the page and see that now I get fresh content.

Device information

• Android device: Sony Xperia XZ1C
• Fenix version: Nightly 200504 06:01 (Build #21250608)
  40.0.20200430224518, 2227e0a76
  GV: 77.0a1-20200430082621
  AS: 0.58.2

┆Issue is synchronized with this Jira Task

[ekager]

Dupe of #5869. Unfortunately still waiting on bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1630000

[PyvesB]

@ekager @eliserichards I'm facing this problem as well. Is this really a duplicate? The two issues you linked seem specific to back button behaviour, whereas this is related to collections, and only became a problem in the past few days. 😉

[ekager]

Ah I understand. I will reopen and retitle

[ghost]

I'm having this issue too. I believe it's specific to collections and I can confirm its happening on mspoweruser.com and bbc.co.uk/news. It only started to happen with the 5.0 update.

[JNavas2]

It seems the restoring of old (cached) content is by design–see Comment on #11506

This is intentional behavior with collections currently. We are restoring the state of the tab with history as well.

I think this unfortunate, because it greatly reduces the usefulness of Collections to me.
I had hoped/assumed Collections would be like Tab/Bookmark Groups.
I'll have to go back to using clunky bookmark folders. 😞

[maroonmoon13]

I agree it's a big "regression" as collections in FF never worked like that. I have been using it since the first preview, and Its a learning curve to get used to this new implementation. But I do feel that for a bunch of stale tabs, a lot of prime real estate on the front page is being wasted. I have removed everything from collections and added everything as top sites. But that's just a bunch of icons which cannot be even moved around or categorized. that's why, "regression"

[JNavas2]

A simple solution to this problem would be a Setting to switch the behavior of Collections between:

• Saved content
• Current content

[maroonmoon13]

Agree. But then we have to contend with Top sites, Bookmarks and collections doing pretty much the same thing when loading current content.

[maroonmoon13]

Nailed it.

[madb1lly]

Hi all,

I didn't realise this is how collections now work, and now I know this I might actually use them. I only see collections as useful if they save content and history. If I want current content then I can use bookmarks or top sites (I know the bookmarks workflow is a pain now, I know), so it's important that collections offers something different.

I'll be using this and testing it now to see how well it fits to what I was hoping for 😃

Cheers 🙂

[Standard8]

The new beta version has top sites, and that might be enough for my use cases, if it becomes customisable.

If collections are to be kept as a set of "saved content", I would like to suggest that they are renamed. "Save to collection" and "Collections" do not suggest to me in any form that they are saved versions of the pages rather than a collection of saved pages... and I could see users being frustrated by that not being made clear.

"Saved Pages", "Saved Content" might be better, although I think they still don't represent it well enough.

[PyvesB]

@madb1lly @Standard8 unfortunately, even in their new state, collections aren't actually "saved content". If you try to load a collection item without Internet connectivity, it will fail. Similarly, if your Internet connection is slow, Collection items will take forever to load.

[cadeyrn]

The new beta version has top sites, and that might be enough for my use cases, if it becomes customisable.

You can already add and remoe top sites. But note that there are plans to limit the number of maximum top sites to 8. It may be enough or not enough for your use case.

" Save to collection" and "Collections" do not suggest to me in any form that they are saved versions of the pages rather than a collection of saved pages... and I could see users being frustrated by that not being made clear.

"Saved Pages", "Saved Content" might be better, although I think they still don't represent it well enough.

That's true, the name does not really reflect the functionality. Unfortunately your suggestions have a similar problem as explained by PyvesB. I think collections are kind of "tab groups". If we see collections as tab groups it opens a few opportunities for enhancements, for example #5967.

[madb1lly]

Hi @Juraj-Masiar,

AFAIK collections are intended to show cached page content. If you want fresh content then bookmarks will do what you want.

However, it could be useful to have an option for each collection to show cached or current page content when the collection is opened.

Cheers 🙂

[JNavas2]

@madb1lly

AFAIK collections are intended to show cached page content. If you want fresh content then bookmarks will do what you want.

Actually, they won't, because accessing Bookmarks is much less convenient.
Save for later review is a good capability, but this is a poor design.
Home screen should be reserved for what the user most often wants.

[handyguy2]

It takes at least 5 clicks to access a bookmark. WAY to complicated and slow. Top sites need to be be synced and easily customizable. What's the point of having an account, if not all settings are saved?

[Matth7878]

What you are asking is to be able to have bookmarks folder instead of collections on homepage. But I agree it would be usefull to have an option for collections to decide wether they should refresh or not when viewing them.

[maroonmoon13]

As has been pointed out numerous times, Top sites could be very useful in implementing the behavior we want. But just when I was getting used to it, it has been further constrained by showing just 2 rows with 4 icons each. Not that accessing the bookmarks was stupidly cumbersome, Now I have to scroll to get to top sites as well.

Half of the UI is taken up by Collections, which to be frank is the least useful features among Top sites, bookmarks, and access saved content. Why the messing with the UI rather than giving us functionality like moving and configuring?

[mmanjos]

I'm still surprised there's any desire to implement a feature based on cached content these days with ubiquitous mobile data and wifi access. The last time I wanted to read a cached page on a mobile device was when I synced a webpage to my Palm IIIc in its charging cradle. From a user perspective, it feels like a bug when I load from a collection to receive an old cached document. Especially so when there's no UI element or training that pops up explaining that saving something to a collection makes it offline/cached.

…

On Tue, Oct 6, 2020 at 1:01 PM maroonmoon13 ***@***.***> wrote: As has been pointed out numerous times, Top sites could be very useful in implementing the behavior we want. But just when I was getting used to it, it has been further constrained by showing just 2 rows with 4 icons each. Not that accessing the bookmarks was stupidly cumbersome, Now I have to scroll to get to top sites as well. Half of the UI is taken up by Collections, which to be frank is the least useful features among Top sites, bookmarks, and access saved content. Why the messing with the UI rather than giving us functionality like moving and configuring? — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#10417 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AA2SQJFTHPF4H62D5GRYF43SJNENHANCNFSM4MZQJPGA> .

[JNavas2]

@maroonmoon13

Half of the UI is taken up by Collections, which to be frank is the least useful features among Top sites, bookmarks, and access saved content. Why the messing with the UI rather than giving us functionality like moving and configuring?

@mmanjos

From a user perspective, it feels like a bug when I load from a collection
to receive an old cached document.

Amen.

[PyvesB]

I'm still surprised there's any desire to implement a feature based on cached content these days with ubiquitous mobile data and wifi access.

It isn't actually fully cached, you need working Internet connectivity for the collection item to load, as highlighted in #10417 (comment). So even in the cases where you're offline, it isn't useful.

[jillesvangurp]

I think the problem with this feature is that it competes for real estate with bookmarks, is not differentiated from bookmarks in any obvious way, and has behavior that is very subtly different from bookmarks in a way that is also completely opaque to the user: it shows you stale content without telling you it is stale content and without a convenient way to refresh (other than digging in the menu for the reload button). That's why there's an endless amount of duplicates being reported because it's an obviously broken bookmark feature that shows you stale content.

The debate in Mozilla seems to be about whether this is salvageable at all and we're basically discussing to add flags to bookmarks to turn them into this weird notion of a collection item, which translates as an offline copy of a page. IMHO it's not worth the UI real estate given that this is a niche feature that the vast number majority of users will ignore. I actually like this as a bookmark UI. I've used firefox for months assuming that it was a bookmark UI and I assumed the caching weirdness was just buggy behavior. Fix that and its fine. Then store the collections in the bookmarks folder so they get synced and everything will be perfect from my point of view. I have no use for offline browsing. I have a 4G phone and pay for it to be online all the time.

[Poopooracoocoo]

And Firefox for desktop doesn't have tab collections. You can't sync them yet either. Tabs have history and bookmarks don't.

I have yet to use collections but if bookmark all tabs were added today, I'd use it immediately. Not all of the tabs I have open have one page in their history though, so I'd have to navigate back on each page and bookmark them, not before of course sorting through all of the pages I've already bookmarked.

I can see the use of an offline page but the aggressive, intentional caching of tab collections confuses me. Unless I was typing something or have intentionally saved it, I don't want an old cached page (unless it's of course a tab I've recently accessed!).
P.S. I've linked my feature request for bookmark all tabs above ;)

[madb1lly]

Hi all,

I totally agree that if one wants bookmarks on the homescreen and/or not collections then that should be possible, but that's not the topic of this issue, that discussion is happening here: #12065 .

If tab collections were actually swappable then I think their use case and the reason why they show cached content would be more obvious, but currently they're not. It's actually very cumbersome to swap collections, which is the only reason I'm not using them more (I actually use them as a way to manage my tab hoarding, but not quite bookmarks).

Still, it's clear that the fact that collections use cache is not clear and needs to be explained to the user and preferably have an option to disable this.

Cheers 🙂

[liuche]

For this bug, we want to refresh the page when loading a page from collections.

This won't have any other changes, we'll still keep the backstack.

[yoasif]

@liuche I think that solves the thing people dislike most about the existing behavior. Now to see how many complain that they lost form data from a saved tab in a collection... 😬

[eliserichards]

For QA:

According to @liuche's comment above, we want to keep the backstack of the page at the time that it was added to the collection, but have a fresh version of the page (e.g. if it is a news site, we should see the latest news not the news at the time we added to the collection). To keep the backstack, we restore the page; then we reload to make it up-to-date.

I was testing with Wikipedia. Click through a few different wiki pages, add page to collection. When we open the page from the collection, we should see the backstack of all of the pages we visited before adding to the collection. We should also see that the wiki page is the most recent version of itself (the page has reloaded). A news site would also be a good example of this to check if it is up-to-date.

[lobontiumira]

Verified as fixed on the 12/14 Nightly build with Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 (Android 10).
I saved the bbc.com news site in a collection, opened the page from the collection after three days, and the page displayed the latest news.
The first image is from 12/11, the second is from today, 12/14:

[toxpal]

The issue still exists for me on 84.1.2 (Xperia 5 II/Android 10). Some sites work just fine, but others always display last cached versions when opening tabs from collections.

Let's say I add website domain.com to collection. When I open domain.com from collection later, app displays old version (even if I open website several days later), and I need to manually reload page. After I reload, this reloaded version is stored in cache, so the next time I open collection again, it displays this cached version, and so on.

Happens on some websites only. For example, with 9to5linux.com. The issue only started after major update to version 80. Used app for years in the past, never had such problem.

[cadeyrn]

@toxpal This is expected since the issue is not yet fixed in Firefox 84. It takes some time to get changes from Nightly via Beta to stable releases.