1711909 - Search shortcuts enabled behavior while handing off from homepage

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[Petruta Horea [:phorea], Desktop Test Engineering (back on Sep 5th)]

Affected versions

• Firefox 89 beta 14
• Nightly 90.0a1 2021-05-18

Affected platforms

• Win 10 64-bit
• macOS 11.4 beta

Steps to reproduce

1. Go to about:newtab
2. Open address bar dropdown and select a search shortcut, then enter a search string
3. Unfocus address bar
4. Start typing in the in-page search field - entered text is handed-off to address bar

Expected result

• It might be less confussing to clear Search shortcut and to start a new search.

Actual result

• Search mode remains open, the previously entered text is deleted and replaced by the string entered at step 4

Regression range

• In 88 release the handling off to address bar was not enabled (happened in bug 1699834), but switching the pref to true and performing the above steps, would enable the search mode for the default search engine (behavior changed in bug 1616700).

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Discussed this on Slack with Petruta. It's unclear what the expectation is here, one side the hand-off is just that, moving focus. On the other side the user may expect to begin the search workflow with a clean slate, thus no search mode.
Anyway, the use-case is quite edge, because once you enter search mode in the urlbar there's not much benefit into closing the urlbar and then starting from the content search field.