101497 - Inline autocomplete should NOT ignore the www in a URL

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core Graveyard :: History: Global, defect, P4)

Description

[Si Ly]

Autocomplete ignores the www in www.foo.com.  See below for why it shouldn't.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Visit a site, say http://www.netscape.com/
2. Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Navigator -> Smart Browsing ->
              -> Location Bar Autocomplete -> Advanced ...
3. Check "Autocomplete best match as you type".
4. Click OK.
5. Double-click the location bar and type "netscape".

Result:

The autocomplete matches www.netscape.com, but the location bar displays
netscape.com (no www).  And when you hit ENTER, you go to netscape.com (no www).
 In this case, netscape.com and www.netscape.com are interchangeable, so it's
probably okay.  But it doesn't work with every server, since foo.com != www.foo.com.

Note that this can also cause subtle problems with cookies because foo.com and
www.foo.com do not necessarily share cookies.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Looks like something for hewitt...

Comment 2

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

Um, what build are you on?  This was an issue up until a month ago...it was
fixed as bug 94870.

Comment 3

[djk]

I was able to reproduce the testcase on win98 build 2001092503.

Comment 4

[Jesse Ruderman]

So what?  Very few sites make www.domain.com and domain.com different, and for 
those that do, it's not a big deal if you get a 404 error due to typing the 
wrong one.

Comment 5

[Si Ly]

It seems my description was unclear, so I'll try to clarify...

www.foo.com and foo.com are not necessarily equivalent. When you visit
www.foo.com and then foo.com later, cookies are not necessarily shared. When
cookies are lost, you get problems like dropped sessions, missing shopping
carts, and so forth. Other minor problems: Visited links highlighting breaks.
Page caching breaks. SSL cert breaks.

I think these are enough reasons call this a bug.  "Very few sites make
www.domain.com and domain.com different" is a lame excuse.

Comment 6

[Jesse Ruderman]

How should this be fixed?  Here are two possibilities:
1. Show the www. version in the dropdown but don't do inline auto-completion.
2. When the user hits enter, throw a www. into the URL to match the previously 
visited URL.  (Only do this if the user didn't type out the entire URL.)

I think both of those solutions would be confusing.

Comment 7

[resigned]

Suggestion number 2 sounds emminently sensible, and not particularly confusing.

More to the point, it is a lot LESS confusing than the current behaviour.

E.g.

1. User goes to a url "www.wibble/whatever".
2. Later the user uses autocomplete to go back by typing "wibble"

Note: at this point, things are MUCH worse than a 404. The majority (by random
personal experience) of domains that do not explicitly map "foo.com" as well as
"www.foo.com" have "foo.com" not even mapped to any server at all.

3. User often gets "server not found" type error
4. ...or "404 not found" error
5. User assumes the webpage is no longer in existence due to the confusing and
plain wrong behaviour.

Jesse's (comment #6) suggestion number 2 would AFAICS prevent all this confusion.