1274568 - Crash when when typing special characters in the URL bar on IOS 8.x

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for iOS :: General, defect)

Description

[Simon Basca [:SimonB]]

Attachment: Crash log of the issue.

Build: 57cc05c7
Device: IPhone 4S ( 8.4)

Steps to reproduce:
1. Open a new tab in Firefox
2. Type @[. in the URL bar and tap go

Actual results: 
- The application will crash.

Comment 1

[Thomas Whaples]

Please note that Mozilla's mobile browser does not and has never owned a gmail account.

Comment 2

[Stephan Leroux [:sleroux]]

After playing around a bit with this, it seems the main point of contention with the @[. url is the square bracket [. There is a great discussion in this SO post [1] talking specifically about the square brackets and other reserved characters and how they affect a URL being valid. Since this only occurs on iOS 8 and not 9, it would seem they've addressed this bug inside WebKit. As for a fix for Firefox, ideally we would treat this kind of input as a search instead of a URL but our current way of validating URLs by using NSURL says it's a valid URL. This falls into the area of validating URLs ourselves since square brackets are definitely acceptable in other parts of a URL. I don't think filtering URLs through a regex would be worth the potentially trouble to fix a bug on a low adoption iOS version. I would remove this from 5.0+ -> + unless there is a neat fix we can do to change this to return searches instead of URLs.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1547899/which-characters-make-a-url-invalid

Comment 3

[Simon Basca [:SimonB]]

Alternate steps to reproduce on IOS 9.x :

1. Go to Firefox for desktop and add some bookmarks
2. Edit one of the bookmarks on desktop by right click and entering properties 
3. Type in the URL field [@. which will default to http://%5B@./
4. Sync Firefox on desktop and mobile device
5. Go to the bookmark location on mobile device and scroll to the edited bookmark

Comment 4

[Stephan Leroux [:sleroux]]

Closing as we no longer support 8.x