1135120 - Search bar sends data to search engines even when search suggestions are disabled

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 803970

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

Description

[Steph]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:35.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/35.0
Build ID: 20150122214805

Steps to reproduce:

- Make sure telemetry and search suggestions are disabled
THEN
- Click on the search bar, either on the magnifying glass or the field itself
OR
- Open an about:newtab or about:home tab and click on the search field integrated to these pages


Actual results:

Data is sent to the default search engine


Expected results:

No data is sent anywhere at all.


The bug apparently occurs since Firefox 33, according to: www.klaus-hartnegg.de/gpo/firefox_changes.html
But I learned about it in Firefox 35 and haven't tested earlier versions.

Comment 1

[Bruno Prémont]

Trying this on Firefox 36 (Linux) I get also a dummy connection to default search provider (I've set an own search engine as default).

According to wireshark Firefox is establishing a connection and closing it right again when one clicks into the search field (not even sending a HTTP request over it - when search engine is HTTPS, HTTPS handshake is performed but no request either).

Comment 2

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Indeed, this is intentional behavior per bug 735543.

Comment 3

[Steph]

Sorry I didn't see the duplicate.

It is some kind of prefetching feature, so shouldn't there be an about:config pref to disable it like there is for DNS prefetching (network.dns.disablePrefetch) and page prefetch (network.prefetch-next) ?


I'm not super keen on the fact that my default search engine knows whenever I use the search box, even if they don't know what I'm searching for or which engine I send the request to (if any).

Comment 4

[Steph]

In case somebody stumbles on this bug with the same question: Apparently, setting network.http.speculative-parallel-limit to 0 does the trick.

See the Speculative pre-connection paragraph here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-automatically-making-connections#w_prefetching

According to the link, it only affects hovering over thumbnails on about:newtab, selecting the Search Bar, and selecting the search field on about:home or about:newtab.

In that case, problem solved with no side effect on regular browsing.