Better URL shortening in browser tab labels

[kycutler]

Fixes #306412
Fixes #306528

[vs-code-engineering]

📬 CODENOTIFY

The following users are being notified based on files changed in this PR:

@jruales

Matched files:

• src/vs/workbench/contrib/browserView/common/browserEditorInput.ts

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR improves how browser editor tabs and descriptions display URLs by reducing noise from long query strings/fragments and ensuring URL paths can be shortened cleanly (avoiding malformed-looking http:/… renderings).

Changes:

• Update BrowserEditorInput labeling to use verbosity-aware URL descriptions (short/medium/long) and prefer page titles for tab names.
• Extend labels.shorten() to recognize scheme:// URLs and shorten their path segments correctly (including trailing-slash preservation).
• Add unit tests covering URL shortening behavior (including mixed URL + filesystem path inputs).

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 3 out of 3 changed files in this pull request and generated 2 comments.

File	Description
src/vs/workbench/contrib/browserView/common/browserEditorInput.ts	Adds verbosity-aware URL description formatting and adjusts name/title composition for browser tabs/tooltips.
src/vs/base/common/labels.ts	Teaches shorten() to detect scheme:// URLs and treat / as the separator for those paths (fixing http:/…-style outputs).
src/vs/base/test/common/labels.test.ts	Adds coverage for URL shortening scenarios on Windows and non-Windows.

[bpasero]

Code Review: shorten() URL scheme support & trailing slash preservation

#	Severity	Issue	Location	Details
1	High	Bug: URLs produce empty leading segment	labels.ts	For file:///some/path, after extracting scheme prefix , the remaining trimmedPath is /some/path. Since the URL branch is exclusive (if/else if), the next branch that strips a leading / is never reached. Splitting /some/path by / yields ['', 'some', 'path']. The empty segment at index 0 will corrupt the shortening logic — it can cause false-positive substring matches, produce results with leading separators like //some, and break the disk-drive prefix heuristic (segments[0].endsWith(':') evaluates on ''). Fix: after extracting the URL prefix, strip the leading / from trimmedPath and append it to prefix (e.g. prefix becomes ).
2	High	Missing tests	labels.test.ts	The diff adds ~20 lines of non-trivial logic (URL detection, separator override, trailing-slash preservation) but no tests. Per project guidelines, changes >10 lines require tests. At minimum, tests should cover: (a) simple URL paths like vscode-remote://auth/a/b, (b) triple-slash URLs, (c) mixed URL and file-system paths, (d) paths with trailing slashes, and (e) the new trailing-slash preservation branch.
3	Medium	Deprecated substr() in new code	labels.ts	The four new substr() calls use a deprecated API. While the surrounding existing code also uses substr, new code should prefer substring(). substr(start, length) and substring(start, end) have different semantics — using substr here works but risks confusion and lint warnings.
4	Medium	Cross-path comparison mismatch with mixed separators	labels.ts	When one path is a URL (separator forced to /) and another is a Windows path (separator \), the uniqueness check paths[otherPathIndex].indexOf(subpath) compares subpaths split with / against raw paths with \. This means a URL subpath host/dir would never match inside host\dir, potentially causing the algorithm to return a less-shortened path than necessary. The pathSeparator override is per-path but the cross-path comparison doesn't normalize separators.
5	Low	Redundant indexOf('//') computed twice	labels.ts	trimmedPath.indexOf('//') is called twice on labels.ts and labels.ts. Should compute once into a local variable: const schemeEnd = trimmedPath.indexOf('//') + 2;.
6	Low	Trailing-slash logic only fires at specific subpath positions	labels.ts	The trailing-slash preservation only works when start + subpathLength === segments.length - 1. If additional trailing empty segments exist (e.g. path/to/dir//), the condition won't match and the trailing slash(es) would be replaced by …. This is edge-case but worth a comment to make the intent explicit.
7	Info	Regex could be documented	labels.ts	urlSchemaRegexp — the \\ inside the character class [^:/\\?#] prevents matching Windows drive-style paths like C:\, which is an important subtlety. A brief comment explaining why backslash is excluded would help future readers.

Summary

The two high-severity items should be addressed before merging: the URL bug (empty segment corruption) and the missing test coverage. The substr deprecation and redundant indexOf are straightforward cleanups. The cross-path separator mismatch is a design limitation worth acknowledging — if mixed URL/Windows paths are expected, the indexOf comparison needs normalization.

[bpasero]

Some local CCR for you to consider, not sure if all applicable.