383606 - Location bar exhibits broken behavior with non-OpenDNS DNS systems

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Michael Trausch]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20061201 Firefox/2.0.0.4 (Ubuntu-feisty)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20061201 Firefox/2.0.0.4 (Ubuntu-feisty)

Mozilla Firefox relies on certain behavior which is unspecified in the DNS system in order to attempt to automatically find things like missing "www." prefixes and TLD suffixes on URLs.  It is the user’s responsibility to know what site they are visiting, not the user agent’s responsibility to attempt to find out for them.

This behavior does not work under the OpenDNS system.  I switched my home network to using OpenDNS because of its reliability, and now I have (note: a single user) complaining that they can no longer use the Firefox address bar to automatically resolve certain keywords into proper URLs when entering them.  For example, this user believes that she should be able to simply type “juploadr” when she intends to go to “juploadr.org”.  Not only is this broken behavior (what happens if there is a .com instead?  I suppose she would get annoyed but that is beside the point.)

This functionality breaks the Internet experience by providing a false idea of how things on the Internet work.  This is similar to America Online and their subscriber-only enhancements that their users *think* is the Internet or the World Wide Web but is not.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use non-OpenDNS servers and type random keywords.  Get to a site.
2. Switch to OpenDNS.  Use same said keywords.  Get a keyword search, like you should.

Comment 1

[Vlad Sukhoy]

Try to disable browser.toolbar.autoFill preference (you can do it via about:config) and see if that yields the behaviour you want.

Comment 2

[Vlad Sukhoy]

The name of the preference is actually "browser.urlbar.autofill".

Comment 3

[a_geek]

Besides the point, but imho OpenDNS does quite similar things than AOL with their "mappings" and "adult" filtering.

Comment 4

[Michael Trausch]

You know, that would appear to be off by default in FF3.

It's not autofill that is the problem.  It is FF trying to be "helpful" and trying to resolve keywords on its own.  That confuses the purpose of the address bar.

Now, I like the fact that with FF3, you can type something, and it shows a list of history items that match.  But if I type "new post" and press ENTER, I get http://www.nypost.com/ (which is the first result on Google if you search for it).  I don't want it to run a "I'm feeling lucky" search on the keywords in an attempt to resolve them, I want an error because I did something stupid.  Why the hell have a separate search field if the address bar provides the same functionality?  The answer, of course, is that the search bar is totally distinct and should be used for searching, whereas the address bar should be used when the address is already known or in the history.

Comment 5

[Michael Trausch]

To be specific, the cause with the issue (and specifically not OpenDNS) is that when one queries for a non-existent domain (for example, http://www.foofoofrufrubarbarbazbaz.com/) a normal DNS server will reply stating that it cannot be found because it does not exist.  Firefox then tries appending .com, or prepending www., and then appears to go to Google and search with the lucky option.

I can see www. being prepended to try to resolve a domain name, but not .com (not anymore).  I think that this whole thing has some issues, but the root of the thing is that I don't want my browser doing things beyond my wildest dreams when I make a damned typographical error or other trivial mistake.

Comment 6

[Vlad Sukhoy]

Michael, I stand corrected, indeed autofill is not the problem. However, I do not think that there is a big chance of action being taken on this because what you want may be quite different from what the vast majority of Firefox users want and that is "just work" in the widest possible range of use cases, said majority most likely doesn't want to be forcefully educated on the technicalities of the domain name resolution on the internet by Firefox (i.e. this is not a bug). I may be wrong.

I suspect that there's another preference related to urlbar which allows to achieve what you want, though.

Comment 7

[a_geek]

Vlad, instead of claiming that "we" want to break FF, while admitting that you yourself don't actually *know* what "users want", and even implying that using bogus services out there makes FF "just work", I suggest that you stop insulting and conduct an appropriate poll instead. This should imho be done much more often, and in the most prominent matter possible, to gather statistical data without asking too much of your users.

I highly doubt that people would like to unwittingly be Net-Nannied, and as much as you tried to educate people about web standards, you could also try to educate people about other relevant issues.

Comment 8

[Vlad Sukhoy]

@a_geek
What was written above is my personal opinion and was asserted so. No "insulting" was intended and I really didn't claim these things you mentioned. I suggest using appropriate public forum (see http://www.mozilla.org/community/developer-forums.html for reference) for related discussion. Forums: a) have much broader audience and b) are intended specifically for discussions. Perhaps this or related issue had been already discussed.

I am not involved in modules related to location bar and will refrain from further comments here.

Comment 9

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

Bulk closing all UNCONFIRMED bugs dealing with places that haven't had any bug activity in over 120 days, have no votes, and are not enhancement requests.

If you are still experiencing this issue in Firefox 3.0 or later, please re-open the bug with steps to reproduce (if they were not part of the original comment).