1665582 - Snap format: Firefox adds "canonical" to DuckDuckGo search on all distros

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Distributions, defect)

Description

[Bill Dietrich]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:80.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/80.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Install snap version of Firefox
2. Set search engine to DuckDuckGo
3. Type in address bar to do a search
4. Term "canonical" is added to search URL

Actual results:

I assume this happens on distros not supplied by Canonical (e.g. Debian, Arch, Fedora, etc). I find this surprising. Perhaps it is intentional policy, or perhaps it is an accident of the snap package first being supported on Canonical distros ?

Expected results:

Maybe it is not a bug, but is it intended behavior ? Will a Canonical-hating user of, say, Debian be surprised/upset to see this ?

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

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

Comment 2

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Mark, do you know anything about this? It sounds like an issue with Snap's build to me and should probably be taken up with them.

Comment 3

[Bill Dietrich]

See https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/firefox-snap-adds-canonical-parameter-to-web-searches/19998/4 which led to me filing here.

Comment 4

[林博仁(Buo-ren, Lin)]

Note that the Firefox shipped via APT in Ubuntu also reproduces the issue, refer the following page for more info:

search - How to remove t=canonical from Firefox browser searches made on DuckDuckGo? - Ask Ubuntu

Comment 5

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

(In reply to 林博仁(Buo-ren, Lin) from comment #4)

Note that the Firefox shipped via APT in Ubuntu also reproduces the issue, refer the following page for more info:

That is an intentional addition, it is not an issue. Both Mozilla and Ubuntu have agreements to ship specific search engines as default or included with Firefox. The additional tag is part of the attribution so that traffic generated can be attributed to the appropriate place. This is common practice amongst browsers.

Note it is only added to searches generated from within the browser UI. If you visit DDG directly, then we wouldn't add it.

(In reply to Drew Willcoxon :adw from comment #2)

Mark, do you know anything about this? It sounds like an issue with Snap's build to me and should probably be taken up with them.

AIUI we generate the snap builds. I guess we're generating them with the Canonical distribution ID. I don't know the history behind that, so passing across to Mike.

Comment 6

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

This behavior is correct. Any builds that are official canonical builds have this change. You can verify they are canonical builds by going to the about dialog and you will see canonical there.

These are effectively partner builds where we are building a custom Firefox for canonical or that canonical is building for themselves.

A Debian person would not have this because they aren't using the canonical builds.

Comment 7

[Bill Dietrich]

(In reply to Mike Kaply [:mkaply] from comment #6)

Any builds that are official canonical builds have this change.

You realize we're talking about a snap build, right ? It could be installed in any distro: Arch, Debian, Fedora, anything that supports snaps.

Comment 8

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

You realize we're talking about a snap build, right ? It could be installed in any distro: Arch, Debian, Fedora, anything that supports snaps.

Yes. But the Snap is primarily a Canonical build. We're currently not producing a generic Snap.

Comment 9

[林博仁(Buo-ren, Lin)]

I checked the Ubuntu APT installation and found that the field seems to be defined in /usr/lib/firefox/distribution/distribution.ini.

I thought it's wierd to attribute Canonical, Ltd. even when the snap's publisher is "Mozilla", just my 2 cents.