1712338 - The history results flicker while typing a keyword used for multiple searches on different websites

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Cosmin Muntean [:cmuntean], Ecosystem QA]

Attachment: history flicker.gif

[Affected versions]:

• Firefox Nightly 90.0a1;
• Firefox Beta 89.0b15;
• Firefox Release 88.0.1;

[Affected Platforms]:

• Windows 10 x64;
• macOS 10.15.7;
• Linux Mint 20 x64;

[Steps to reproduce]:

1. Open the Firefox browser.
2. Type "cars" in the address bar and press enter.
3. Open a new tab, type "cars" in the address bar, select the "Amazon" one-off search and press Enter.
4. Repeat Step 3 using the "Bing", "DuckDuckGo" and "Wikipedia" one-off searches.
5. Close the opened tabs.
6. Type "car" in the address bar and press the Space key multiple times.
7. Observe the history displayed while performing Step 6.

[Expected result]:

• There is no flicker while typing the keyword.

[Actual result]:

• The history results flicker while typing the keyword.

[Notes]:

• Attached a screen recording of the issue.

Comment 1

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

This is due to how we update the view in chunks as new results are fetched. IMO there's definitely room for improvement with bugs like this, and it would be good for us to spend time on them. We have some similar recent flicker-related bugs on file and this might be a dupe, but AFAICT the flicker here isn't due to replacing a SERP because it dupes form history or something specific like that, it's just due to how the view update logic replaces results more generally.

I made a screen recording of the gif and I'll try to post screenshots later.