410328 - Hitting down arrow key quickly when entering a URL causes Firefox to visit the wrong website

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Bertram Bourdrez]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b3pre) Gecko/2007121804
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b3pre) Gecko/2007121804

In previous versions of Firefox, I was used to entering the first part of a URL, then hitting the down arrow and enter to visit the first site that matched it. In Minefield/Firefox3 this has unpredictable results. Firefox 3 seems to process the down arrow key and enter before it has finished parsing all the keystrokes and sorting the list of matches.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Quickly type the first few letters of a website address in the URL bar, e.g. news.bb as the start of news.bbc.co.uk
2. Hit the down key and enter.

Actual Results:  
If you're too quick, it might only have parsed the 'ne' and take you to a frequently visited website with 'ne' in the name like anything with a .net domain or news.google.com. Sometimes it will even fail to select anything at all and you will be taken to Google with the partial URL as the search query.

Expected Results:  
Firefox should visit the site that best matches all the entered information, presumably news.bbc.co.uk or another site with 'news.bb' in its URL or title.

If you wait for a while after entering the partial URL, the list of matches will end up as predicted, with news.bbc.co.uk at the top.

Comment 1

[Denny Crane]

Yes, this is very annoying. I started noticing it with FF3.

Comment 2

[Luke]

This happens a lot.  It is also on Mac platforms.

Comment 4

[BMO Automation]

Per policy at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bug_Triage/Projects/Bug_Handling/Bug_Husbandry#Inactive_Bugs. If this bug is not an enhancement request or a bug not present in a supported release of Firefox, then it may be reopened.