1279415 - Firefox for Android auto-fills URLs that I have never visited

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1267208

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Josh]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.118 Safari/537.36
Firefox for Android

Steps to reproduce:

Open Firefox for Android.

Start typing something in the URL – a website you have never visited. For example, I have never visited netflix, but if I type the letters n-e-t, the URL bar auto fills netflix.com.




Actual results:

My URL bar fills with websites that I have never visited and never will visit. It should only fill URLs that I have previously visited or that are in my bookmarks – otherwise it should perform a search.

This is a problem for several reasons:

1. It is entirely unknown where these websites come from. Is my data being transferred to a remote server to query for the completion? Is the browser sending information about the websites that I visit to Mozilla's servers for "analytics" purposes? All of that is unacceptable for a piece of software that supposedly considers privacy as its core mission.

2. How are websites chosen to be listed here? It creates unfair advantage for some websites. It has sent me to websites that I don't want to visit. For example, I want to search for "net", so I type in n-e-t and hit enter and end up on Netflix, instead of search results. There are many worse examples.

3. It has sinister implications for controlling the behavior of non-savvy users who will end up on these websites without even realizing what happened.

4. It slows users down by forcing them to hit extra keys on a large percentage of searches.

5. The feature completely sucks in general.


Expected results:

The URL bar should not fill in URLs that I have never visited. At the very least, there should be a simple way to toggle this behavior to turn it off. I've searched in about:config and could not find a way to turn it off even there.

Comment 1

[Josh]

An alternate possibility, as I think about it: could an add-on be doing this? If you clear your history completely and then type the letters n-e-t into the address bar On Firefox for Android, does it auto-fill with netflix.com? (one example of many random sites that the browser tries to send me to)

Comment 2

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

The domains are from the Alexa top 1000 domains with some restrictions.