1636686 - Reader mode URLs (especially "switch to tab") should be deduplicated and replaced by "Title - URL" for the address bar, like normal pages

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[Jeff Fortin]

Attachment: firefox reader URLs in the addressbar.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:75.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/75.0

Steps to reproduce:

Start typing into the addressbar for words present in the title or URLs of pages I previously visited

Actual results:

I get a TON of noise from "about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblahblah%20somegibberishunreadablecrap.com" instead of getting cleanly shown results like regular pages. See the attached screenshot for a "simple" example, but I typically get a screenful of those unreadable "about:reader" URLs for everything I type.

Expected results:

At the very least (maybe as a first-step intermediate fix), the URLs should be decoded/unescaped, so that they don't have all this %3A %2F %20 gibberish in them.

Next, it should show the title, to be consistent with the rest of suggestions in the addressbar. Indeed, every other result that comes from either bookmarks or history is presented as "Title - human-readable URL - action" whereas this is currently presented as "garbled URL - action". So I would like it to display the title and cleaned URL (as above) so that I my eyes can easily skim it.

Third, ideally Firefox should detect if those match a bookmark for the corresponding page, and if so present only a single/entry for this in the addressbar's dropdown, instead of both the bookmark and the reader URL variant.

Maybe the new megabar/awesomebar code could be an opportunity to clean up that particular thorn in the otherwise pleasant user experience?

Comment 1

[Release mgmt bot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.

Comment 2

[Jeff Fortin]

Attachment: firefox reader URLs in the addressbar - 2

Another screenshot to illustrate the duplication problem...

Comment 3

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Because this bug's Severity is normal and has not been changed, and this bug's priority is -- (none,) indicating it has has not been previously triaged, the bug's Severity is being updated to -- (default, untriaged.)

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Yes, this seems annoying, I actually think this is is only for switch to tab though, I don't think we show about:reader urls for other entries.