1318813 - Searching for a numeric division (e.g. 12/5) in the awesomebar shows no search suggestions

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[Bruce]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:51.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/51.0
Build ID: 20161114004005

Steps to reproduce:

Reproducible in Firefox v50 through v53.0a1.

1) Set Firefox to 'Show search suggestions in location bar results' and set Google as the default search engine.
2A) Type "12/5" (without quotes) in the awesomebar, or
2B) Type "12/5=" (without quotes) in the awesomebar


Actual results:

No suggestions are shown, only the '12/5 -- Search with Google' entry is shown. Screenshot - http://i.imgur.com/WsgFwOJ.png


Expected results:

At least the calculated search suggestion '=2.4' should have been shown, along with some other suggested searches that Google serves for the query e.g. '12/5 as a mixed number'.

Here is a gallery of screenshots from all other browsers handling this correctly - http://imgur.com/a/vMDeZ.

'12+2' works (http://i.imgur.com/j4wpku9.png) even in Firefox so I am hoping this is not supposed to be happening.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

This is done on purpose, we don't have a good way to tell if the typed text is a numerical operation or part of a url, so to stay on the safe side and protect the user privacy, we don't send that text to the search engine.
We could probably filter out some of this with additional logic, but it would be only partial and hard to maintain.

Comment 2

[j.w12321]

I understand that logic for the 2A case, but is there a reason preventing this from working in the 2B case with the equal sign at the end, which should make it clear enough that the end user wants the query parsed as a mathematical operation?

It's become muscle memory for me to highlight the address bar (Ctrl-L) and start typing a math equation instead of opening a calculator, and the fact that Firefox breaks on anything involving division due to the "/" is irritating and makes it nearly unusable for doing quick math.

Comment 4

[didaio]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [::mak] from comment #1)
> This is done on purpose, we don't have a good way to tell if the typed text
> is a numerical operation or part of a url, so to stay on the safe side and
> protect the user privacy, we don't send that text to the search engine.
> We could probably filter out some of this with additional logic, but it
> would be only partial and hard to maintain.

Please open this bug again and really resolve this problem. Method with an equal sign is looking good. Please apply that to next version of Firefox.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

There's no evidence the points in comment 1 are no more valid.
The problem is that we use a very simple regex now to stay on the safe side, we'd need to make it far more complex, and then privacy bugs would be more likely to sneak through, just checking if there's an = at the end wouldn't cope, "12/5/=", "12/5/1=", "12/5?=" may all be  valid urls, how do we distinguish a complex operation from a possibly url?

I'm reopening the bug because there's value into supporting divisions, but we don't have a very good solution atm.

Comment 7

[j.w12321]

I'm not sure whether this is a result of the same bug (or if it's related to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=722435) but having a single decimal point in the mathematical expression also results in no search suggestions.

e.g. "123+456" and "123+456=" produce a single Google suggestion of 579, however "12.3+4.56" and "12.3+4.56" produce no suggestions entirely.

This is minor but irritating and I hope it can be fixed easily. If there are privacy concerns over an overzealous regex leaking data, add an obscure option in about:config to give search suggestions for URL-like expressions... or let the regex itself be configurable.

Comment 8

[jtagcat]

Please vote for this issue.

Indeed an option in about:config to disable the privacy protection would work.

Comment 9

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

All the examples work for me today.

Comment 10

[jtagcat]

What platform are you on?

Comment 11

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Windows 10, using Firefox Nightly. Not sur why the platform would matter here.

Comment 12

[jtagcat]

I'm on Fedora & stable. The fix probably hasn't reached stable.