1648188 - If the search service fails to initialise properly, allow the Firefox to be used in a limited mode

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Search, defect, P3)

Description

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

If the search service fails to initialise, we should still allow Firefox to be used.

At the moment, if it breaks, then the address bar can't be used. The new tab page also doesn't finish starting properly.

Although this should be an extremely rare scenario, that's hopefully only limited to test builds, I think it is worth making sure that at least some of the browser is usable, so that users can still try and find information without needing to resort to switching browsers.

This will probably need some investigation as to what exactly breaks, could we return a dummy engine or something.

It might also be interesting to add telemetry to see if this is happening in the wild at all.

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Note to self: Also need to think about other parts of the browser that may be broken, e.g. the context menu.

Comment 2

[Mandy Cheang [:mcheang][she/her]]

Attachment: Bug 1648188 - Fix SearchService init failures so that the address bar can be used to search history and bookmarks. r=Standard8,mak

Comment 3

[Mandy Cheang [:mcheang][she/her]]

Attachment: Bug 1648188 - Make _initialize variable private in SearchService. r=Standard8

Comment 4

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/4716950128c5
Make _initialize variable private in SearchService. r=Standard8
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/034192694257
Fix SearchService init failures so that the address bar can be used to search history and bookmarks. r=Standard8,mak

Comment 5

[Noemi Erli[:noemi_erli]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/4716950128c5
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/034192694257

Comment 6

[Mandy Cheang [:mcheang][she/her]]

Before my patch:
When the search service failed to init on start-up the address bar cannot use search engines. The address bar is in a state where the user cannot search their history and bookmarks. No result panel will be shown.
See the "before-fix" video.

After my patch:
When search service init fails address still use search engines. But the result panel will show when the user types, the user will see their history and bookmarks results in the result panel. See the "after-fix" video.

Comment 7

[Mandy Cheang [:mcheang][she/her]]

Attachment: before-fix.mov

Comment 8

[Mandy Cheang [:mcheang][she/her]]

Attachment: after-fix.mov

Comment 9

[Cristian Baica [:cbaica], Release Desktop QA]

The issue is verified as fixed using the provided trybuilds from treehearder on Windows 10, macOS and Ubuntu. Address bar is no longer stuck and searching in bookmars works correctly when search init fails (like in the provided video).