1630431 - Origin autofill should coalesce www/non-www

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

When you type youtube.com and hit enter on a new profile, three rows are added to moz_origins:

• http://youtube.com
• https://youtube.com
• https://www.youtube.com

After that, when you type youtube, it's autofilled to https://youtube.com and that redirects to https://www.youtube.com.

Currently the origins autofill query doesn't sum/coalesce the frecencies in these three rows when it determines what to autofill as you start typing youtube. [Edit: Not true, it coalesces schemes but not www, see comment 2. So it will coalesce the first two URLs above, but not the third.] But they represent the same site, so the query probably should coalesce them somehow. Then it can pick the individual row with the highest frecency to complete the autofill.

However, there's a danger in overcounting sites this way. We probably don't want to coalesce both the target and source of a redirect if they don't sum to the same amount that a non-redirect visit to the target would have been. So this isn't straightforward.

Comment 1

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

I'm pretty sure we talked about doing this at one point after bug 1239708 was fixed, but I couldn't find a bug. So there's related discussion in some other autofill bug somewhere (or maybe it was offline).

Comment 2

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Nope, sorry, the origins query does coalesce schemes (e.g. http/https). We did that in bug 1469651, so that might be the conversation I was thinking of. Just not www/non-www. Comment 0 still applies otherwise. I'll update the summary.