1517294 - Autocomplete doesn't respect browser.urlbar.usepreloadedtopurls.enabled and .expire_days

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1267208

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Yorwba]

When entering a term into the address bar that can't be autocompleted based on browsing history, autocomplete falls back to a hard-coded list of Alexa top 500 sites. E.g. "pottery" gets autocompleted to "potterybarn.com". That is confusing, as I have never visited that site, and autocomplete usually works based on history.

When similar autocomplete functionality was added to Firefox proper in bug 1211726, it was gated by config options: `browser.urlbar.usepreloadedtopurls.enabled` and `browser.urlbar.usepreloadedtopurls.expire_days`, so that the default URLs are no longer suggested after some time (default 14 days), after which the user has presumably visited all top sites they were planning to.

However, top site completion on Android was implemented beforehand in bug 858829, without any option to enable or disable it separately from autocomplete in general. That is despite the possible downsides of the feature that were later raised in bug 1211726 and mitigated there as mentioned above.

I think that should be rectified by extending `browser.urlbar.usepreloadedtopurls.enabled` and `browser.urlbar.usepreloadedtopurls.expire_days` to also control whether URL autocomplete on Fennec falls back to the list of top sites or not.

Comment 1

[Mira Lobontiu (Android QA)]

Can confirm the issue.
Tested on Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 (Android 8), with the latest Nightly 66.0a1 (2019-01-06).

Comment 2

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Behavior requested is the same as in bug 1267208