1416881 - Entering characters with character/accent marks on macOS doesn't remove the autofilled selected part

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[Matija Munjaković [:matija]]

Attachment: Screen Shot 2017-11-13 at 9.45.07 PM.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
Build ID: 20171112125346

Steps to reproduce:

OS: macOS, with turned on accent menu (should be on by default, I believe)
Pre-requisite: have some history entries in Firefox

When typing inside the address bar, use the OSX accent menu by holding a key and select an accented letter (e.g. č, ž, é).


Actual results:

What happens is Firefox uses the first history entry of the non-accented letter and replaces its first character with the accented letter.


Expected results:

Either a history entry with the correct accented letter should appear (say a unicode domain, if one is in history) or no address should be highlighted but rather just a suggested search engine query.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand the bug looking at the screenshot. What's in the first suggestion is not in your history, the Address Bar just assumes what you typed looks like a domain and tells you what will happen if you confirm what's currently typed in the url bar. since in the urlbar you typed "čircleci.com/", it tells you if you confirm that you'll end on that page (likely a 404, but the Address Bar can't know).
It's possible I'm misunderstanding your report though, if so maybe you could rephrase it for me.

Comment 2

[Matija Munjaković [:matija]]

Attachment: firefox-bug.mov

video of what is happening

Comment 3

[Matija Munjaković [:matija]]

Hi, I included a video above ( https://bug1416881.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=8929065 ).

I hope this makes it more clear.

The way I see it, once I select the letter "č" (or any other accented letter) from OSX's accent menu, the Firefox address bar should reload. Instead, what happens is Firefox automatically replaces only the first letter. Apart from not being intuitive, this also makes it difficult to use the default search engine via address bar if your keyword starts with an accented letter.

Comment 4

[Matija Munjaković [:matija]]

Attachment: Second example

For example, here's a video of what would happen if someone wanted to do a search directly from the address bar for "école" on OSX. 

Instead of modifying a history URL that begins with e (and chaning it into é but retaining the rest of the string), it would be more intuitive if after entering the accented letter, the input text for reloaded and only contained that letter.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Thank you, the videos help a lot.
In pratice, when you type the normal letter, autofill kicks in and adds the autofilled part. When you select the different letter, the autofilled part should be removed, instead it gets unselected.
If we can detect the event, clearing the autofilled part should be easy.

Comment 6

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

the autofilled part should indeed be removed when the first letter changes.
We reproduced this on MacOS by enabling the accented menu option and in an empty urlbar holding down a letter that would normally cause autofill to activate.
We're not sure which events are sent whe nthis happens, so we don't know if we can detect it. Maybe "composition" events are fired?

Comment 7

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

We investigated this today as part of a live coding session and we found that compositionstart is not fired in this case. The next thing I want to investigate is whether a second input event is fired when the "c" char changes to a "č". I'm guessing one is, and if so we can probably use it as a cue to inspect whether the autofill is still valid.

Comment 8

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Stephanie raised a great point: After the "c" changes to "č", ideally anything that starts with "č" and that should be autofilled would be autofilled at that point. So not only should the old autofill be cleared, but any new autofill should happen. However, if I'm not mistaken, currently nothing can be autofilled with "č" due to bug 1566151, which I marked as a see-also.

Comment 10

[Marc Seibert (:mseibert)]

Attachment: Bug 1416881 - Entering characters with character/accent marks on macOS doesn't remove the autofilled selected part.r=mak

Comment 11

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/498b4ed438a3
Entering characters with character/accent marks on macOS doesn't remove the autofilled selected part.r=mak

Comment 12

[Sandor Molnar[:smolnar]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/498b4ed438a3

Comment 13

[Ardelean Oana, Desktop QA [:oardelean]]

Reproducible on a 2023-07-15 Nightly build on macOS 12.
Verified as fixed on Firefox 118.0b2(20230829180158) and Nightly 119.0a1(20230830042643) on macOS 12.