1419812 - impossible to search for word 'gnome' in the address/search bar

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Parrenin]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
Build ID: 20171112125346

Steps to reproduce:

Steps to reproduce (on debian 9, FF57):
- open FF57, with a unique address+search bar
- search for the word 'gnome' (without the quotes)




Actual results:

=> FF57 tries to load a page and it never succeeds.
It does work if I separate the address and search bars, or if I surround the word gnome with quotes


Expected results:

FF57 should return the result of the search for the 'gnome' word

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

In about:config, if you search for

browser.fixup.

what values come up, if any?


In a terminal window, if you run:

nslookup gnome


what output do you get?

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

FWIW, this works fine for me on macOS, and it being problematic for a specific word suggests something peculiar about your setup. You could also try using an empty firefox profile ( https://support.mozilla.org/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles ) to narrow down the cause of the issue.

Comment 3

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Oh, and the other option is that you have a bookmark with the 'gnome' keyword which corresponds to the URL Firefox tries to load - speaking of which, what is the URL of the page Firefox tries and fails to load?

Comment 4

[Parrenin]

So, indeed, I have a key:

browser.fixup.domainwhitelist.gnome=True

in about:config
Setting it to False, it now works.
But I am really wondering why this key was set in the first place.

Comment 5

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Parrenin from comment #4)
> So, indeed, I have a key:
> 
> browser.fixup.domainwhitelist.gnome=True
> 
> in about:config
> Setting it to False, it now works.
> But I am really wondering why this key was set in the first place.

If you type a single word term in the URL bar, say "foo", we do a search. However, if your DNS also claims that it knows a host "foo", we show a notification bar that offers to take you to http://foo/ instead of the search page ("Did you mean..."). If you use this, we store the relevant word in the pref, so that the next time you type "foo", we go to the host immediately without doing a search. So, presumably, at some point in the past, that's what you did. Perhaps on a network where DNS claimed to know every host, which is a technique some ISPs use to "steal" traffic that would otherwise go to the search engine. See bug 1333191, bug 728670.

Comment 6

[Parrenin]

Thanks for the explanation.