1604430 - Autofill is not completing some history items

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Places, defect)

Description

[Kestrel]

Attachment: Autofill example

STR:

1. In the address bar type news.google.com and press Enter.
2. Create a new tab and type news.ycombinator.com and press Enter.
3. Create a new tab and type news.g.

Expected:

In step 2 news. should autofill to news.google.com.
In step 3 news.g should autofill to news.google.com.

Actual:

Only news.ycombinator.com is autofilled.

Regression range:
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?fromchange=a382f8feaba41f1cb1cee718f8815cd672c10f3c&tochange=380cf87c1ee3966dd94499942b73085754dc4824

Most likely regressed by Bug 1239708.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

please attach a log from about:support

Because there is a threshold, it's not given that news.g should autofill, it should if it's visited "often". If you visit another time (or couple times) news.google.com, does it start completing?

Comment 2

[Kestrel]

This is with a clean profile. I can confirm that some domains start to autofill after multiple typed visits but it is inconsistent, the number of visits required depends on the domain. A user would expect a single recently typed visit to be enough to qualify for autofill.

Typed domains that reliably autofill with a single visit:

news.ycombinator.com
aliexpress.com
aol.com
aldi.com
abc.com
att.com
ancestry.com

Typed domains that don't autofill with a single visit but do after a second visit (or more):

news.google.com
amazon.com 
alibaba.com
allianz.com
amtrak.com

Consideration should be given to users who limit or regularly clear history, so may only have a single visit recorded at any one time.

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

The threshold is dynamic, with every visit and action it may change. It is intended to work properly after a brief "training", so on a new profile it can indeed show those behaviors. The results may change exchanging the order of visits, plus it's possible some domains have indeed a lower score because they redirect.
There's no specific reason to limit history, indeed it's not a default feature, and users who regularly clear history can easily bookmark urls for autofill to happen, that should work reliably.
Considered the threshold exists to help vast majority of users (by avoiding a large number of false positives), I don't think we want to remove it to cover rarer cases.

We are more interested in knowing when things that were visited frequently and recently are not autofill, that would affect most users. Indeed bug 1602728 for example has an high priority.

Afaict, I don't see a bug in the behavior here, we'll work next year to improve frecency in general, and that may help with this case, but we won't explicitly work on this specific behavior.