1604240 - HTML-based about:config search bar does not search values anymore

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1501658

(Toolkit :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[Drew Phillips]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Steps to reproduce:

Open the new HTML-based about:config preferences manager.

Type "crash-stats.mozilla.org" into the search bar.

Actual results:

No results are found because only preference names are searched.

Expected results:

The setting "breakpad.reportURL" should appear because our search matched the value for that preference. The old XUL-based preferences dialog searched preference names and values.

Having to manually read through the entire preferences list to find a value by name is time consuming and prone to overlooking results.

The search bar does read "Search preference name" so it's clear this is the new expected behavior, but I consider it a regression that we used to be able to search by value (very useful) and the new "enhanced" version removed this functionality.

Comment 1

[:Paolo Amadini]

Yes, as you noticed, the placeholder string was updated in bug 1579115 to clarify that this is the new behavior of the search box. Now that the page is implemented with standard HTML instead of XUL, we can just rely on the regular find-in-page functionality (Ctrl/Cmd + F) to look for specific preference values.

We made this separation consciously because this latter use case is less common, and separating it has the advantage that the search box can now be fully dedicated to its primary purpose without generating spurious results. It would also be quite complex to implement a value filter properly, considering we would have to consider and write automated tests for several edge cases like the value changing because of either user input or background operations.

Comment 2

[Drew Phillips]

Thank you for the clarification. And sorry for not finding that exist bug. I searched but came up empty.