1615632 - Entering APPDATA\ROAMING\…\PREFS.JS into the address bar loads http://www.appdata.com/ROAMING/…/PREFS.JS

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1566499

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[grommish]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0

Steps to reproduce:

Win10 Pro 1909 x64

Received a PUP-warning about
File: 1
PUP.Optional.Conduit, C:\USERS\XXXXXX\APPDATA\ROAMING\MOZILLA\FIREFOX\PROFILES\42XTUMIX.DEFAULT-RELEASE\PREFS.JS

Didn't recognize the file, so I copied "APPDATA\ROAMING\MOZILLA\FIREFOX\PROFILES\42XTUMIX.DEFAULT-RELEASE\PREFS.JS" and put it into the URL Bar to search

Actual results:

Firefox attempted to connect to:
http://www.appdata.com/ROAMING/MOZILLA/FIREFOX/PROFILES/42XTUMIX.DEFAULT-RELEASE/PREFS.JS

Luckily, it 404'd, but anything could have been at the far end of that request.

Expected results:

Should have sent the Search Terms to the Default Search Engine (Chrome does this correctly until the same conditions).

Comment 1

[Gingerbread Man]

This may be a duplicate of bug 1566499.

Enter about:config into the address bar and double-click browser.fixup.alternate.enabled to set it to false.

prefs.js is a plain text file that stores your Firefox settings. The path is your profile folder. You can access it easily by entering either about:support or about:profiles into the address bar.

Comment 2

[grommish]

In this case, FF is taking the string APPDATA\ROAMING\MOZILLA\FIREFOX\PROFILES\42XTUMIX.DEFAULT-RELEASE\PREFS.JS, breaking the string down, and adding a top-level domain (APPDATA.COM) which happens to be real. To Clarify:
APPDATA\SOMETHING\ELSE\ENTIRELY navigates to http://www.appdata.com/SOMETHING/ELSE/ENTIRELY (and returns a 404 since appdata.com is a registered domain).

Am I being particularly dense in thinking that Text in the URL/Search Box that has no PERIOD then gets translated to a successful URI isn't supposed to happen? Am I missing a use-case where this would be a good thing to have?