652348 - Should fallback to search in case of DNS lookup error

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 523132

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement)

Description

[Andrey Paramonov]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0) Gecko/20110327 Firefox/4.0 Iceweasel/4.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0) Gecko/20110327 Firefox/4.0 Iceweasel/4.0

Long ago, browsers only allowed users to enter valid page address in address textbox. Firefox was one of the first browsers to introduce the revolutionary paradigm of "Location bar": now users are not required to know/remember the exact page address, they can enter search phrase and get to the desired site! Google and Firefox really changed the way people use the Web nowadays.

However, currently one cannot reliably use search phrase containing "." (dot). For example, if I enter ".net", I get rather unhelpful message:

Firefox cannot find server www..net.

However, if I use Google search, I immediately get what I expect in the first link: a page describing Microsoft .NET (http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework).

I propose that in such a case Firefox falls back to search engine method instead of reporting error. It should happen only once to prevent infinite loop in case of offline site.

I believe search queries containing "." are rather common for some categories of people, i.e. for programmers as "." is a special symbol in many programming languages.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Enter ".net" in Location bar
2. Press "Enter"


Actual Results:  
Unhelpful error message

Firefox cannot find server www..net.


Expected Results:  
Load page http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework

-or-

show search results on ".net"

Comment 1

[Thomas Ahlblom]

Behavior reproduced with a new clean profile:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:6.0a1) Gecko/20110424 Firefox/6.0a1