1495057 - Mismatched suggestions for autofilling the about: pages

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[YF (Yang)]

Steps to reproduce:
1. Open the latest Nightly with a profile with some history.
2. Type the "about:" to urlbar.
3. Type the "about:a" to urlbar.


Actual results:
1. If you test this feature with a new profile, it looks good, some about: pages are listed on the suggestions, but their position is unstable.
2. In step 2 with old profile, you will see the history listing that is completely unrelated to about: pages.
3. In step 3 with old profile, you will see the "about:about" has been correctly filled in, but the suggestions is mostly not related to about: pages.


Expected results:
about: pages listed as address bar suggestions with normal priority.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to YF (Yang) from comment #0)
> Actual results:
> 2. In step 2 with old profile, you will see the history listing that is
> completely unrelated to about: pages.

This is due to recent changes where we strip any scheme, included about:, searching about: is the same as searching an empty string. We may want to fix it.

> 3. In step 3 with old profile, you will see the "about:about" has been
> correctly filled in, but the suggestions is mostly not related to about:
> pages.

we have only one entry per about:, and it has a low frecency.

Basically by the current design what you see is not a bug, though I think we should better handle typed schemes, when they are not http/https. That is what we were doing before, I think new autofill changed that code to always strip any scheme.

Comment 2

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [::mak] from comment #1)
> This is due to recent changes where we strip any scheme, included about:,
> searching about: is the same as searching an empty string. We may want to
> fix it.

This happens for any string that ends in :.  You can type diowejidoj: and the results will be the history results (except for the heuristic result).  That doesn't seem right IMO.  It may be worth filing a separate bug for that, depending on whether this bug really encompasses it, which is hard to tell without working on it first.

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

imo, we should go back to only ignore http/s, it was just working better.

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

For history this is probably happening at https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/70cf6863bd85af2a3188ec1fe5209a3ec1b2de86/browser/components/urlbar/UrlbarProviderPlaces.jsm#420 but the stripURLPrefix() helper is being used across other providers, and in most cases it sound like it should only apply to most common protocols (http, https, maybe ftp but I'm not 100% sure if it's an interesting use-case, it would be for ftp servers that also have an https version in history... what about sftp?).

It would be useful to do some code archeology in searchfox to find why we switched the behavior in the past from only stripping http(s) to strip any protocol, so we can ensure to not regress the reasoning behind that.

Comment 5

[Stephanie Cunnane [:scunnane]]

Attachment: Bug 1495057 - Improve search results when "about:" is typed into the URL bar. r=adw

Comment 6

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The following patch is waiting for review from an inactive reviewer:

ID	Title	Author	Reviewer Status
D154163	Bug 1495057 - WIP - Improve search results when "about:" is typed into the URL bar. r?mak	scunnane	mak: Back Aug 21, 2022

:scunnane, could you please find another reviewer?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 7

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/7bba16d75a31
Improve search results when "about:" is typed into the URL bar. r=adw

Comment 8

[Cristian Tuns]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/7bba16d75a31

Comment 9

[Giorgia Nichita, Release Desktop QA]

Reproduced this issue with a build from 2018-09-28 on Win 10.
Verified as fixed on Firefox 106.0 (20221010110315) on Win 10, Ubuntu 21.04 and macOS 10.13.