1212337 - Search term with empty suggestions breaks future valid suggestions from displaying

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

Description

[Stuart Philp :sphilp]

Occurs on 41 and 44, OSX 10.11, Google as default search, suggestions are on.

Searching for a term that does not have any results in the response array, for example:

https://www.google.com/complete/search?client=firefox&q=ç©

responds with:

["ç©",[]]

Will stop future valid suggestions from displaying in the suggestions list, even though the response to those searches contains an array of suggestions. A restart of Firefox will fix this, but that shouldn't be needed.

Steps:

1. Perform a search for a known good search (such as "a") to verify search suggestions are on and working, 10 suggestions should be returned in the network response as expected, and those 10 suggestions should be displayed in the suggestion list.

2. Perform a search with a term that doesn't return results (such as the above example, "ç©"), note that no suggestions are returned in the network response and nothing is displayed in the suggestion list (perhaps a message should be shown in the suggestion list? Like "No suggestions for search <search term>").

3. Perform a search again for a known good search (such as "a"), 10 suggestions are returned in the network response as expected, however they are not displayed in the suggestion list.

No future search suggestions will display until firefox is restarted.

Comment 1

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

This was supposedly fixed in bug 1181868, but I remember stumbling once on an edge case that remains. I suspect this can only be reproduced on retina/hidpi screens, and that there's one additional step to reproduce that's missing here.

Comment 2

[jimmyhmiller]

I've found a consistent way to reproduce this. You need to do exactly as Stuart said above but first turn off all your one-click search engines (Preferences > Search > Unclick all one click).  I haven't tested this on a non-retina display. I have made a change that makes this bug go away, but it doesn't seem like the right fix. Change the two 16's here (https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-beta/file/84939af40230/browser/themes/osx/searchbar.css#l39) to 17's and it goes away. I'd submit a patch but this seems like a hacky way to fix it. I was wondering if there are any tools to help diagnose the problem better? Maybe something like devtools for the xul?

Comment 3

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to jimmyhmiller from comment #2)
> I've found a consistent way to reproduce this. You need to do exactly as
> Stuart said above but first turn off all your one-click search engines
> (Preferences > Search > Unclick all one click).

Indeed, this was the missing step to reproduce consistently.

> I haven't tested this on a non-retina display.

This doesn't reproduce on a non-retina screen. But after reproducing on the retina screen, moving that window to a non-retina external screen isn't enough to "fix" it. New windows opened on the non-retina screen can't reproduce the problem.

> I have made a change that makes this bug go away, but it
> doesn't seem like the right fix. Change the two 16's here
> (https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-beta/file/84939af40230/browser/
> themes/osx/searchbar.css#l39) to 17's and it goes away. I'd submit a patch
> but this seems like a hacky way to fix it.

This doesn't seem to be the correct fix, but the size of that icon is likely causing the problem, as it seems to take 16.5px on my retina screen, and 17px (and blurry) on non-retina.

> I was wondering if there are any
> tools to help diagnose the problem better? Maybe something like devtools for
> the xul?

There's the "Browser Toolbox" that's the equivalent of devtools for the browser's UI, but unfortunately it's not very helpful for panels that disappear as soon as you click outside of them.

Nihanth, is this something you can help with?

Comment 6

[(inactive) Nihanth Subramanya [:nhnt11]]

I can't reproduce this bug anymore, even after disabling all my one-click engines. Resolving.