1154835 - whitespace should be stripped out of search engine names

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Search, defect, P3)

Description

[[:Cww]]

UITelemetry tracks how often you use various one-off search buttons. This is really useful but it trips me up when the search engine reported has newlines in it (and honestly, whitespace, too). It would be nice not to have to deal with it (and also generally trim whitespace from search engine names as a rule)

for example:

other-
    Gbase.com Guitar Search
  .oneoff

Comment 1

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

This is not a problem only for telemetry. The gbase.com engine also causes the tooltip on its one-off button to be larger than other one-off tooltips, and the 'Search <engine>' text from bug 1110767 (the gray bar in the middle of the panel, when hovering a one-off button) also shows excessive whitespace.

Fixing this could also help a tiny bit to reduce hijacking, as I think we have observed some hijackers working around our rule of "no engine with the same name as a default engine" by appending some whitespace to the engine name.

Comment 2

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to Florian Quèze [:florian] [:flo] from comment #1)

> Fixing this could also help a tiny bit to reduce hijacking, as I think we
> have observed some hijackers working around our rule of "no engine with the
> same name as a default engine" by appending some whitespace to the engine
> name.

Some also add random punctuation signs, eg '!' or '®'. We should also strip these before duplication checks.

Comment 3

[Stefan Plewako [:stef]]

(In reply to Florian Quèze [:florian] [:flo] from comment #1)
> I think we have observed some hijackers working around our rule of
> "no engine with the same name as a default engine" by appending some whitespace
> to the engine name.

As I understand you have the data to back the "hijackers" claim?

Comment 4

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to Stefan Plewako [:stef] from comment #3)
> (In reply to Florian Quèze [:florian] [:flo] from comment #1)
> > I think we have observed some hijackers working around our rule of
> > "no engine with the same name as a default engine" by appending some whitespace
> > to the engine name.
> 
> As I understand you have the data to back the "hijackers" claim?

I had such data at the time I wrote comment 1, yes.

Comment 5

[Stefan Plewako [:stef]]

OK, how did you recognize that it was different from legitimately working around that rule and other bugs or anything like details?

Comment 6

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

It's not possible to have thousand of users hand-editing a file and doing the exact same change to the name and submission URL, especially to add an affiliation code in the submission URL.

Comment 7

[Stefan Plewako [:stef]]

(In reply to Florian Quèze [:florian] [:flo] from comment #6)
> It's not possible to have thousand of users hand-editing a file and doing
> the exact same change to the name and submission URL, especially to add an
> affiliation code in the submission URL.

Oh, it is possible and only extremely unlikely and where this is coming from?

I do not get how 'I think we have observed some hijackers working around our rule of "no engine with the same name as a default engine" by appending some whitespace to the engine name.' becomes editing and becomes hijacking in all cases and not working around 10 year old Mozilla bugs.

Comment 8

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Moving to p3 because no activity for at least 1 year(s).
See https://github.com/mozilla/bug-handling/blob/master/policy/triage-bugzilla.md#how-do-you-triage for more information