1131087 - Search activity will use geo default instead of user-set default

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Search Activity, defect, P3)

Description

[:Margaret Leibovic]

STR:

1) Set a non-default engine as your default (e.g. DDG)
2) Upgrade to a version of Fennec with the patches from bug 1129576
3) If you're in the US, your default search engine in the search activity will now be Yahoo, not DDG

Comment 1

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

36 WONTFIX?

Comment 2

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

(In reply to Aaron Train [:aaronmt] from comment #1)
> 36 WONTFIX?

Probably. We need a plan for dealing with "userengine" and "cachedengine". We are using a single SharedPref for both intents. Bug 1129576 clears the SharedPref so we can re-check the "cachedengine".

People can just pick their favorite engine again, which is not friendly and we might do this clear-the-cache again in the future.

Comment 3

[petebiz]

Mark and Aaron, I hope you'll take a second look at this because this may be more broken than you realize.

I'm running Android Firefox Beta 36.0 on a Nexus 4.  Selecting my preferred default engine (Google) multiple times did not result in it being used.

History:
* I used Google before the Yahoo default default change.
* I switched my default to Google upon the Yahoo change.
* Search results came from Google for a while.
* Search results starting coming from Yahoo.
* I select Google as my default again.
* Search results keep coming from Yahoo.
* I select Google as my default again again.
* Search results keep coming from Yahoo, again.
* I delete Yahoo as a search provider.
* Search results finally come from my default, Google.

If nothing else, I guess I can tell Margaret that deleting Yahoo as a search provider may be a work-around for her, but I suspect that's not an ideal outcome.

Comment 4

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

(In reply to petebiz from comment #3)
> Mark and Aaron, I hope you'll take a second look at this because this may be
> more broken than you realize.
> 
> I'm running Android Firefox Beta 36.0 on a Nexus 4.  Selecting my preferred
> default engine (Google) multiple times did not result in it being used.
> 
> History:
> * I used Google before the Yahoo default default change.
> * I switched my default to Google upon the Yahoo change.
> * Search results came from Google for a while.
> * Search results starting coming from Yahoo.
> * I select Google as my default again.
> * Search results keep coming from Yahoo.
> * I select Google as my default again again.
> * Search results keep coming from Yahoo, again.
> * I delete Yahoo as a search provider.
> * Search results finally come from my default, Google.
> 
> If nothing else, I guess I can tell Margaret that deleting Yahoo as a search
> provider may be a work-around for her, but I suspect that's not an ideal
> outcome.

To confirm, since this bug is related to the search-activity (outside the browser i.e, 'Firefox Beta Search' in your launcher). Are you searching from within that or within Firefox?

Also, are you located in the U.S?

Comment 5

[petebiz]

Everything I'm describing relates to searches inside the Android Firefox Beta app itself, in what I'd call the awesome bar if it was desktop Firefox.

Comment 6

[petebiz]

By the way, I just checked and do NOT see this behavior on my 2012 Nexus 7.  I've only experienced this on my Nexus 4.

Comment 7

[:Margaret Leibovic]

Sorry for taking so long to look into this bug... I suspect what petebiz is seeing is us switching the default back to Google in late betas before updating to release [1], and then switching back to Yahoo.

Unfortunately, we don't have any way of knowing whether a user set their default search engine back to the original default, so when we changed from Yahoo->Google as the app default, there was no noticable difference, but then when we changed the default again from Google->Yahoo, we would assume that the default hadn't been modified, so we migrated it again.

In any case, this issue does not have to do with the search activity, which is what we're trying to track in this bug, so let's move that discussion to a new bug if it needs to continue, and keep this bug about the search activity.

[1] http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-beta/rev/69d50177865b

Comment 8

[:Margaret Leibovic]

Actually, the issues described here sound like a combination of that beta churn and bug 1073775. So I think they should be resolved now.

Comment 9

[petebiz]

To update, despite what I said about my Nexus 7 not exhibiting it, it now is.  It was rebooted in between my first report and now.

The behavior of my Nexus 7, right now, running Android L 5.0.2, Firefox 37.0:

 * Settings,Customize,Search shows Google as my default search engine (NOT yahoo)
 * I just now typed "house bill" without the quotes into the address bar
 * I got search results from yahoo.
 * I set Yahoo as default search
 * I set default back to Google
 * I search for "house bill" without the quotes, and I got Google search results

So despite the interface explicitly showing me Google as my default, it was sending searches to Yahoo until I changed it away from Google and then back.

***So perhaps the bug is more limited in that it displays an incorrect default.***  I never tried before switching away and back on my Nexus 4, but the Nexus 4 certainly did report Google as my default while still returning Yahoo results, just as the Nexus 7 did until switching away and then back to Google.

Comment 11

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Is this going to be able to make Beta? We have a shortened release cycle in 37.

Comment 12

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Comment 9 sounds exactly like bug 1073775. Given that the actual search is returning the correct engine, I am not inclined to get risky and try to push a fix. If we can get more confirmation on the STR, we can start looking into an additional fix.

Re-noming for tracking.

Comment 13

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

@petebiz - Can you retest with the most recent Beta?

Comment 15

[Catalin Suciu [:csuciu]]

Adding here the STR's from bug 1142238 :

"I'm able to reproduce this issue when changing the default search engine for the first time. Changing it for the second time shows the correct behavior.   

If: 
1. Start Firefox with a clean profile. 
2. Add the Firefox search widget to the home screen 
3. Change the default search engine to anything else from list (e.g DDG)

Result: Firefox searches are conducted through DDG. Firefox widget searches are conducted through Google 
     
4. Change the default search engine again to anything else from list (e.g Amazon)

Result: Firefox searches are conducted through Amazon. Firefox widget searches are conducted through Amazon 

Tested on Galaxy Note 3 with Android 4.4.2"

Comment 19

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Mark, should we be tracking this, and if so, when will we see some activity?

Comment 20

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

302 -> Margaret

Comment 21

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (relman/hg->git project)]

I want to make sure we sort out what behavior we want and that it is correct. It seems very unclear here. Tracking for 49 so I keep an eye on this.

Comment 22

[:Margaret Leibovic]

We want the user set default, this is a bug.

However, the search activity is not being actively prioritized right now, we have more important problems to solve.

I haven't had time to look into this myself, and realistically I'm not going to. Maybe mkaply would be interested in taking a look, since he's been touching more of the search stuff recently. Really what I want is to drop the Gecko search service, so we don't end up with bugs like this.

Comment 23

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

I'll see what I can figure out.

Comment 24

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

has the priority of this bug changed?

Comment 25

[:Margaret Leibovic]

(In reply to Jim Mathies [:jimm] from comment #24)
> has the priority of this bug changed?

This is not a top priority because the search activity is not highly used.

It would be good to fix this, yes, but there are other things that are more pressing.

Comment 26

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

After having experienced similar trouble with the crash reporter, I think that part (or possibly even most) of the problem might be down to the fact that the search activity runs in a different process, yet is accessing Firefox's app shared preferences.
Android doesn't play too well with the same shared preferences instance being used from different processes and it is entirely possible that one process won't notice the changes made by the other process, because the shared preferences seem to be read from disk only once during the lifetime of the process.
A simple solution would be to pass Context.MODE_MULTI_PROCESS here (https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/46fe2115d46a5bb40523b8466341d8f9a26e1bdf/mobile/android/base/java/org/mozilla/gecko/GeckoSharedPrefs.java#101), which would force the shared preferences to be always reread from disk, although that's not super desirable, either and in any case has been deprecated as of API23.

Additionally, while it would no longer be necessary to actually kill the search activity's process in order for a search engine change to be picked up, it would still be necessary to exit the activity (e.g. by pressing back) and reenter it, because the shared preferences are read directly only during activity creation. Afterwards, the search engine manager attempts tracking any changes to the shared preferences (https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/46fe2115d46a5bb40523b8466341d8f9a26e1bdf/mobile/android/base/java/org/mozilla/gecko/search/SearchEngineManager.java#93) and pass any search engine changes back to the search activity as they happen, however in practice this doesn't seem to be working. After a bit of googling around, it seems highly probable that shared preferences change listeners are only functioning within the same process, but not across two different processes. So in our case, the search activity's SearchEngineManager is never notified about any changes to the shared preferences.

Comment 28

[Ritu Kothari (:ritu) (Inactive, please n-i to RyanVM, jcristau, or pascal)]

Hi Sebastian, Barbara, I am confused why this is a P3. Resetting a user-set search engine to a geo location is annoying on a Fennec update. It sounds like a pretty core scenario. Thoughts? I hope we can fix it in Fx50/51.

Comment 29

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

The search widget is not a default UI the user needs to go deep into the Android OS UI to find it (comment 25). It also requires the user to add the search widget to the homescreen then switch the search settings in Firefox from the default search engine (comment 15). There is a fairly simple workaround of switching it back and forth once that gets it back in sync.

Comment 30

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

(In reply to Kevin Brosnan [:kbrosnan] from comment #29)
> The search widget is not a default UI the user needs to go deep into the
> Android OS UI to find it (comment 25). It also requires the user to add the
> search widget to the homescreen then switch the search settings in Firefox
> from the default search engine (comment 15). There is a fairly simple
> workaround of switching it back and forth once that gets it back in sync.

This.

The search widget and activity are currently not really maintained. We are actually looking into whether it is worth keeping to ship them. If it is then we definitely need to invest more time into it. Hence I moved it to the backlog (P3).

Comment 31

[Ritu Kothari (:ritu) (Inactive, please n-i to RyanVM, jcristau, or pascal)]

(In reply to Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian) from comment #30)
> (In reply to Kevin Brosnan [:kbrosnan] from comment #29)
> > The search widget is not a default UI the user needs to go deep into the
> > Android OS UI to find it (comment 25). It also requires the user to add the
> > search widget to the homescreen then switch the search settings in Firefox
> > from the default search engine (comment 15). There is a fairly simple
> > workaround of switching it back and forth once that gets it back in sync.
> 
> This.
> 
> The search widget and activity are currently not really maintained. We are
> actually looking into whether it is worth keeping to ship them. If it is
> then we definitely need to invest more time into it. Hence I moved it to the
> backlog (P3).

Thanks Kevin ang Sebastian, I understand. Doesn't seem like this will get fix in 50, marking it as fix-optional.

Comment 33

[David Bolter [:davidb] (NeedInfo me for attention)]

We looked at this during regression triage. It seems unfriendly to unset a user's preferred search engine, do we want to continue tracking this for a fix?

Comment 34

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

Not much has changed since comment 25. Only the search activity is affected and this one has not a high priority. In fact I would like to look at telemetry to see whether it's worth keeping at all.

Comment 35

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

So even though the search engine has been changed in Firefox preferences, when the search activity queries the search engine, it's getting the previous search engine. It only gets the new preference when Fennec has been completely closed.

Is it possible that when the search engine is changed it's not getting written immediately to the place where the activity/engine manager queries it?

Here's where we end up getting the previous engine:

https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/mobile/android/base/java/org/mozilla/gecko/search/SearchEngineManager.java#264

Comment 36

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

@mkaply

Please see comment 26 - shared preferences are not meant to be used across processes.

Comment 37

[Nathan Froyd [:froydnj]]

Given that this is officially classified as a backlog bug, it doesn't seem worth tracking it in any way.

Comment 38

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Taking off my plate.

Comment 39

[bgvaughan]

I'm using Firefox Beta 54. Prior to the latest update, the search functiin in the widget switched to Yahoo, although my default in Firefox remained DuckDuckGo. Deleting Yahoo from the list of search engines, changing from DDG to another search engine and back again, and rebooting the phone all left the widget set to search via Yahoo. There is no apparent way to change the setting.

Comment 40

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

This is an ex-Search Activity now (bug 1221344).