Bugzilla

I'm marking this as regressed by bug 1636583, because that's the behavior change that made broken databases "visible" in the urlbar and not just in bookmarks/history views. It's not exactly a direct regression, but the effect is similar.

I'm marking this as regressed by bug 1636583, because that's the behavior change that made broken databases "visible" in the urlbar and not just in bookmarks/history views. It's not exactly a direct regression, but the effect is similar.

I figured that without the Slack discussion what I said here is unclear.

What happens is that bug 1636583 changed the urlbar behavior a bit to make it more consistent (always obtain the same result when typing the same string) and safer (stop passing raw strings to the docshell). Now the urlbar always executes a search and picks the first result out of it.
But, if the places.sqlite database is corrupt or locked by a third party, we can't get that first result, thus we end up doing nothing, while the previous version was just passing the raw string to the docshell.
This means even if history and bookmarks were broken, and the urlbar was likely to not return results at all, it was still possible to type a string, press Enter and visit a page or search.
This is indeed very useful for support reasons and it should keep working regardless of other broken things.