1334019 - leading question mark being passed to search engine

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[yeggiebrao]

The location bar has always allowed to enter a search term prepended with "?" to force the entry to be interpreted as a search, rather than as a domain. for example, if I want to search for "pdf.js", I would enter it as "?pdf.js". The question mark itself is not supposed to be included in the search passed to the search engine, however, starting in 51, the question mark is getting passed.

Comment 1

[yeggiebrao]

regression range:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/pushloghtml?fromchange=62ccb498db3ec05bef1b6427d5b1b4b0e501cad5&tochange=183b9d08d2648d4ed50fa1d354b50bd43c11a891

Comment 2

[yeggiebrao]

sorry, i wasn't especially confident in the above regression range -- maybe I entered the wrong response ("good"/"bad") at some point. I ran mozregression again and here's what I got:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/pushloghtml?fromchange=64cd7d87e78cf2e4b919aad10fb9f4962834b004&tochange=70d19ed29c980ba3d6825e5286bda08fa7dc676f

Comment 3

[Loic]

[Tracking Requested - why for this release]:

Comment 4

[Julien Cristau [:jcristau]]

Is this feature documented anywhere?  I didn't spot anything on https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-firefox-bookmarks-history-tabs or https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-web-address-bar

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to yeggiebrao from comment #0)
> The location bar has always allowed to enter a search term prepended with
> "?" to force the entry to be interpreted as a search.

AFAICT, that worked by chance, but was never supposed to be a feature. Indeed we don't even have tests covering it.
So, I'm not considering this a regression, and I'm removing the tracking requests, since, even if it's working differently, it was not something done on purpose.

This could be related to bug 1177895, but it depends on whether we allow the restriction tokens to be typed without a space.
I honestly think we should allow to type restriction tokens at the boundaries, and along with bug 1177895, it would also properly fix this, and make it a proper feature. And sure, we need tests at that point.

Comment 6

[yeggiebrao]

From https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/URL_Bar_Algorithm ...
"The algorithm says it's a search if it contains a space or a quote before the first dot, colon or question mark, or if it starts with a question mark."

This feature has been in Firefox for a long time, and also exists in Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Edge, at least (did not test Opera or Safari).

Some other references to this feature I found in a quick search:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=245597#c12
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=245597#c16
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/2792vm/doing_single_word_searches_in_firefox_for_android/chyqwcr/
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/2792vm/doing_single_word_searches_in_firefox_for_android/chyx6cn/
https://mike.kaply.com/keyword-search-support/#comment-308667
http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/index.php/2012/05/18/firefox-you-re-annoying-me-again#c5442

Comment 7

[yeggiebrao]

it may be worth noting that Chrome additionally has a nice UI change that occurs when you enter "?"....

Comment 8

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to yeggiebrao from comment #6)
> From https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/URL_Bar_Algorithm ...
> "The algorithm says it's a search if it contains a space or a quote before
> the first dot, colon or question mark, or if it starts with a question mark."

Thanks for pointing that out. That phrase refers to URI fixup. The fact is the way we use URI fixup changed in the last years, so while the page is right that URI fixup does that, we now use it differently.
Thus, the feature was a consequence of using URI fixup in a certain way, not a direct feature of the awesomebar, and indeed the lack of specific tests confirms that.

Btw, I'm not saying we don't want this, we surely want it and we should implement it properly with tests, so it doesn't regress in the future.
Since it's referenced, I'm bumping up the priority, still not something we need to track imo, but would be nice to have a fix sooner than later.

Comment 10

[wizzwizz4]

As far as I can see, a string beginning with `?` will still always be searched, but the search engine will be passed the question mark too. This isn't _very_ important, because many search engines will completely ignore this question mark, except in wildcard mode which only power-users will have their search engines in. It's still a nice feature to have, though.

Comment 11

[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

Comment 12

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Fixed by bug 1315509.

Comment 13

[Emil Ghitta, QA [:emilghitta]]

I have managed to reproduce this issue using Firefox 54.0a1.

This issue is verified fixed using Firefox 65.0b9 (BuildId:20190107180200) on Windows 10 64bit, macOS 10.13.6 and Ubuntu 18.04 64bit.