1674486 - Enter in address bar processed out of order (loss of typed characters)

Status: REOPENED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[Denis Lisov]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:84.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/84.0

Steps to reproduce:

I was using my system (with Nightly 2020-10-29) under heavy load (high CPU and GPU load, swapping) and tried searching for some terms using keyboard by typing the following
<Ctrl+T>some terms<Enter>

Actual results:

I was taken to the search page for "som"

Expected results:

Even under heavy system load, keyboard input shall be processed in order. Opening a new tab, typing a search query and pressing Enter shall eventually take me to a search engine with that query, not randomly truncate the query.

Comment 1

[Clara Guerrero ( Need Info Brindusa Tot Please)]

Hi Denis,

Can you provide a memory report from about:memory? Here are the steps for you to get it:
In the URL bar type about:memory and press enter
Click ""Measure and save"" (optionally with ""anonymize"" checked to hide URLs, although this will likely make it more difficult for us to figure out which site, if any, is causing the leak)
Save the memory report somewhere
Attach the report to this bug

Also since you could reproduce this issue on latest Nightly build, can you capture a performance profile using
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance/Profiling_with_the_Built-in_Profiler
https://perf-html.io/

Best,
Clara

Comment 2

[Denis Lisov]

Sorry if I was misunderstood :-) I do know the reasons for swapping, CPU and GPU load (the leak was in a Webex conference; the CPU and GPU load were from a different application running on my computer) and this is not what this bug is about.

This bug is specifically about the fact that under load keyboard control is unreliable: I open a new tab, enter search terms, press Enter and don't get to the search page I need. To get what I want, I need to make a pause between entering the search terms and pressing Enter because otherwise Firefox uses some arbitrary prefix of the entered text instead of all the entered text.

Do you still want me to provide a memory / perf report the next time I see this problem?

Comment 3

[Clara Guerrero ( Need Info Brindusa Tot Please)]

Got it! Thanks for clarifying. Please attach your about:support information, I'm setting a component for this in order to get the dev team involved.
(If the team feels it's an incorrect one please feel free to change it to a more appropriate one.)
Best regards,
Clara

Comment 4

[Clara Guerrero ( Need Info Brindusa Tot Please)]

(Just to be clear, the browser does not seem frozen, you just type but only some characters of the word are taken into account instead)

Comment 5

[Denis Lisov]

Attachment: about:support copied as text

about:support information attached. The browser did not feel frozen, just a bit sluggish, but that was expected. I'm not exactly sure, but it looked like when I pressed Enter the whole input was seen in the address bar.

Comment 6

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

It's strange, I don't see how the Enter event may arrive before others, but it's possible the tracked value was not updated and we ended up picking a result with incomplete input. It's something to investigate.

Comment 7

[Denis Lisov]

One additional interesting side effect I've seen that may be related was that typing
<Ctrl+T>kw some terms<Enter>
where kw is a search bookmark keyword resulted in searching the default search engine(!) for "kw some" instead of triggering the correct search engine for that keyword.

Comment 8

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

(In reply to Denis Lisov from comment #7)

One additional interesting side effect I've seen that may be related was that typing
<Ctrl+T>kw some terms<Enter>
where kw is a search bookmark keyword resulted in searching the default search engine(!) for "kw some" instead of triggering the correct search engine for that keyword.

That sounds like the keyword result from UnifiedComplete didn't arrive in time before enter was pressed. Splitting up UnifiedComplete may help with that, or it might not if the problem is more related to slow Places database access. It also sounds like a different problem from comment 0 though, although both might be related to the heavy CPU/disk load.

Comment 9

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

Closing this bug because it's a duplicate of Bug 1750317 which solved the problem of the truncated string not being searched.

Comment 10

[Denis Lisov]

Pretty sure I've seen instances of this behavior in Nightly builds newer than 2023-01-19 when bug 1750317 landed. If I notice it again, should I reopen this bug or do something else?

Comment 11

[Denis Lisov]

I've just seen this problem again on Nightly 2023-03-10.
I opened a new tab, typed in a medium-length search request (20 chars or so, Cyrillic in case that could matter), pressed Enter and the search executed was missing the last 4 characters of my query. This happened in a session running for a few days, with ~40 loaded tabs and ~6000 total tabs (yeah, I've got a problem with accumulating these over years, but that should not break the address bar), after building a few big software packages (so parts of code/data could be swapped out). As usual, trying to reproduce the problem again immediately after failed.
Sorry if I should have posted this on bug 1750317 instead, but I don't have appropriate permissions to even comment on that.

Comment 12

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

Thank you for posting an update on this issue.

We suspect this issue is about the heavy-tab-load case. Perhaps we hit the maximum timeout since the urlbar awaits sometime after the user presses Enter, and at a certain point we give up waiting and load what we have.

We will keep investigating and this is a bit of an edge case due to the heavy-tab-load situation.
This should remain open and will need further investigation.

Comment 13

[firefoxbugs]

This still happens pretty frequently for me. I'm also on Linux, just in case that has anything to do with it. The <enter> key is processed before other characters I've already typed or deleted. Let me know if any other info would be useful.