URL autofill/autocomplete should be case insensitive
Categories
(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)
Tracking
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| Tracking | Status | |
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| firefox85 | --- | fixed |
People
(Reporter: billdillensrevenge, Assigned: daisuke)
References
(Blocks 2 open bugs)
Details
(Keywords: papercut)
Attachments
(6 files)
WhyWontItAutocomplete.png
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0
Steps to reproduce:
This is a somewhat long standing issue: in the URL bar, I'll be typing in a subreddit I visit more than once a day, for some, like r/firefox, it autocompletes as soon as I hit "F" on the keyboard (reddit.com/r/ is already typed in), and then I just hit enter. For others, for whatever reason, it doesn't autocomplete after reddit.com/r/ , it's underneath the URL and I have to it the down arrow once or just continue typing out the subreddit manually and then hit enter. (this issue is not specific to reddit, it's lots of websites)
I posted about this on reddit and a user (comment since deleted) posted this: Browser.urlbar.default.behavior ...I don't really know what that means, can someone explain what might be going on here and if it's intentional or not?
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Comment 1•6 years ago
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Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.
Here's what this looks like: for whatever reason, Firefox will not autofill/autocomplete the r/switch URL, but I don't have this problem with the majority of other subreddits I type in (there's a few more subreddits that aren't autofilling/autocompleting as they should, just like r/switch)
Gosh sorry for posting again but I just noticed even instagram.com won't autofill/autocomplete. This is crazy! This is P1 or at least P2
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Comment 4•6 years ago
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(In reply to Will from comment #0)
I posted about this on reddit and a user (comment since deleted) posted this: Browser.urlbar.default.behavior
That suggestion is nonsense.
Autofill depends on a score threshold, if the score of a url is over that threshold, then it will autofill. The score depends on whether you visit a url often or whether it's bookmarked, for example.
Are those urls visited often or bookmarked?
There is a bug around related to disabling history/bookmarks in urlbar suggestion options, so first of all I must ask you what are your settings related to the urlbar suggestions under the Privacy and Security / Address Bar section of about:preferences.
Do you Clear history on shutdown by chance?
Any other history or bookmarks related preferences you may have changed?
Yes, some of the URL's I visit frequently and yet they still do not autocomplete, it's really strange and annoying. I don't think I've ever had an issue with bookmarks not auto completing though.
I do not clear history on shutdown.
All 3 boxes are checked in the Address Bar section in Privacy & Security and I haven't done any tinkering or changes, it's an issue in Firefox.
(I think it's worth mentioning that I've come across people complaining about this issue quite a few times over the years and I just assumed it was a known issue and being worked on, but apparently not)
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Comment 6•6 years ago
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The priority flag is not set for this bug.
:adw, could you have a look please?
For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.
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Comment 7•6 years ago
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(In reply to Will from comment #5)
(I think it's worth mentioning that I've come across people complaining about this issue quite a few times over the years and I just assumed it was a known issue and being worked on, but apparently not)
The behavior changed multiple times over the years, so the problem is not necessarily the same.
Also, mostly users are requesting us to complete full urls, instead of the current behavior, that is to complete up to the next slash. that is tracked in bug 1597791, but your issue appears different and more related to the score of urls/domains.
If you can give me an example of a domain that you visit often and is not autofilled, I can give you a script to run to check scores.
Here's what I think proves there's an issue and it needs to get fixed: the URL bar refuses to autocomplete the Android reddit as I'm typing it in, but it's still suggested below (green arrow). As you can see, what I've typed in is an exact match for the URL except for the "d" at the end of Android, yet it still won't autocomplete it.
(Also, notice that in this example, I do actually have the Android reddit bookmarked and it still refuses to autocomplete. In the other examples I have attached screenshots of, they are not bookmarked.)
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Comment 9•6 years ago
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Marco, Will is talking about URL autofill here afaict, not origin/domain autofill, so we can exclude score problems.
Will, looking at the screenshot, the URL has an uppercase "A" in it, but you're typing a lowercase "a", and I guess that's why it's not autofilling the Android part. If you type an uppercase "A", does it autofill? I don't recall whether URL autofill was ever case insensitive, and if so, whether we regressed it at some point. Maybe?
I notice when I try to reproduce this, autofill flickers -- the remaining part of the URL is autofilled and selected but then it immediately disappears... At the least, we should fix that.
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Comment 10•6 years ago
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Oh sorry, I missed the Instagram comment. That's probably due to scoring, yeah. So far we haven't uncovered any bugs per se due to scoring, so I doubt this is one. It's very likely you don't visit Instagram "often" enough compared to other URLs for Firefox to autofill it, given how the autofill algorithm is designed to work.
The other example here, r/Switch, is the same uppercase question as r/Android.
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Comment 11•6 years ago
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Differently from origins, paths are case sensitive anyway (we could ignore that though).
From https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html40-970708/htmlweb.html:
"URLs in general are case-sensitive (with the exception of machine names). There may be URLs, or parts of URLs, where case doesn't matter, but identifying these may not be easy. Users should always consider that URLs are case-sensitive."
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Comment 12•6 years ago
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Ok I can confirm that the biggest problem here is the case sensitivity. I strongly believe that it should be changed to be case insensitive, it's completely unreasonable to expect users to be mindful of the case of each letter they're typing in the URL bar. The user experience right now is poor because of this and frankly, we cannot afford silly little problems like this.
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Comment 13•6 years ago
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(Chrome's autocomplete is not case sensitive, as you can see)
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Comment 14•6 years ago
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I'll morph this bug to cover case sensitivity in URL autofill, and I'll file another bug for the flickering I mentioned in comment 9.
Will, for domain/origin autofill (the Instagram case), there's a hidden preference you can set to tweak the autofill threshold: browser.urlbar.autoFill.stddevMultiplier. By default it's zero, so Firefox will autofill domains with frecencies >= the average frecency. Try setting browser.urlbar.autoFill.stddevMultiplier to something like -1 so that the threshold is one standard deviation below the average.
I'm starting to think we should default this pref to something like -1 instead of zero so that we err on the side of autofilling too much instead of too little.
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Comment 15•6 years ago
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(In reply to Drew Willcoxon :adw from comment #14)
I'll morph this bug to cover case sensitivity in URL autofill, and I'll file another bug for the flickering I mentioned in comment 9.
Will, for domain/origin autofill (the Instagram case), there's a hidden preference you can set to tweak the autofill threshold:
browser.urlbar.autoFill.stddevMultiplier. By default it's zero, so Firefox will autofill domains with frecencies >= the average frecency. Try settingbrowser.urlbar.autoFill.stddevMultiplierto something like -1 so that the threshold is one standard deviation below the average.I'm starting to think we should default this pref to something like -1 instead of zero so that we err on the side of autofilling too much instead of too little.
Thank you Drew. And about changing the pref to -1 instead of zero, I think that's a good idea because autocomplete is such an important part of UX efficiency. (I go to instagram a lot, it's probably my 2nd or 3rd most visited website, so it's quite strange and bad that it wasn't autocompleting)
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Comment 16•6 years ago
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(In reply to Drew Willcoxon :adw from comment #14)
I'm starting to think we should default this pref to something like -1 instead of zero so that we err on the side of autofilling too much instead of too little.
I'm not sure, I still think the current value is good, most reports were about actual bugs, not many about origins not being autofilled.
I'd rather evaluate:
a) remove the threshold for URL autofill. It makes sense for origins autofill, but once you start typing a url, the subset is a lot more restricted and the user may always want a help. It should be tested with a pref.
b) fix bug 1466233 so that autofill can "learn" user habits.
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Comment 17•6 years ago
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We only have a small, constant threshold for URL autofill though, 20. Is that the one you mean? The "threshold" we usually talk about only applies to origins.
I agree about bug 1466233.
I wonder if it's possible to design an experiment to test my idea of dropping the threshold even more. I could talk to Ben or Teon about it. Although I doubt it would be a priority for management, especially since we have many other experiments planned this year.
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Comment 18•6 years ago
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Is it possible to compare Firefox's to Chrome's and Safari's? It would be helpful to know if we're way out of step with other browsers.
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Comment 19•6 years ago
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(In reply to Drew Willcoxon :adw from comment #17)
We only have a small, constant threshold for URL autofill though, 20. Is that the one you mean? The "threshold" we usually talk about only applies to origins.
Ah, I forgot about that, you're right, we're already in a good shape here.
At this point we should just fix the case-sensitivity bug.
I wonder if it's possible to design an experiment to test my idea of dropping the threshold even more. I could talk to Ben or Teon about it. Although I doubt it would be a priority for management, especially since we have many other experiments planned this year.
Yeah, but what we'd measure for success there? We should count how many times the user picks autofill vs how many times they pick something else, would that suffice? But honestly, if we lower the threshold further it's very close to removing it completely so the experiment should have at least 3 branches: normal, lower, none. The risk is that it will just show a pathological decrease in efficiency that may not tell us anything in term of "better user value".
As I said, most reports were about bugs (like the casing here, or bookmarks/history filters elsewhere) than about "this thing I visit often is not filled", so we may be discussing a red herring.
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Comment 20•6 years ago
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I just came across this by accident, notice it's not case sensitive for theverge.com. So this issue is actually about, case sensitivity after slashes? I'm not exactly sure (and yes, the issue remains with the subreddits not autocompleting unless the case matches)
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Comment 21•6 years ago
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Yes, it's case insensitive for domain names since domain names are case insensitive, but sensitive for paths (i.e., starting at the first slash) because paths are sensitive. So what we're talking about here is treating paths as if they are case insensitive when technically they're not.
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Comment 22•6 years ago
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But does it actually cause any problems? Chrome does this (see screenshot in comment 12)
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Comment 23•6 years ago
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We can do it, and I think we've decided to do it based on the discussion here in this bug, it's just that we haven't started working on it yet.
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Updated•5 years ago
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Updated•5 years ago
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Updated•5 years ago
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Comment 24•5 years ago
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Folks, this is low-hanging fruit! And please do it for Fenix too.
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Comment 25•5 years ago
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This is the bug tracker for Firefox Desktop, for Fenix you should open an issue here: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix (provided one is not present already)
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Updated•5 years ago
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Comment 26•5 years ago
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Comment 27•5 years ago
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Comment 28•5 years ago
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Backed out for xpcshell failures on test_casing.js
Backout link: https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/e87ed61375e45fb9a3c8eb33e207b94da78a62cd
Log link: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/logviewer?job_id=322371607&repo=autoland&lineNumber=2545
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Comment 29•5 years ago
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Not directly about this bug but I remember a few years ago there was talk of making a sort of "Project Low-Hanging Fruit" for issues like this one, what ever came of that? It is a really good idea, easy to fix issues that make meaningful improvements
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Comment 30•5 years ago
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Comment 31•5 years ago
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Updated•5 years ago
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Description
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