1783980 - Consider autofill behavior for hidden URLs/origins and zero-frecency origins

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, task, P3)

Description

[Daisuke Akatsuka (:daisuke)]

This is a follow-up for bug 1503293.

As Drew pointed in phabricator, we may consider how to handle hidden or zero frecency items.

2. Modify the origin query so that only origins with > 0 frecency are autofilled. That will break the zeroThreshold() task and maybe others because it will be a change in expected behavior. We will need to decide how we handle bookmarks with <= 0 frecency. If an origin itself is bookmarked, then we should probably autofill it. But what about an origin that is not itself bookmarked but there are some bookmarks that include the origin?
3. Modify the origin query so that hidden URLs aren't autofilled. The origins table doesn't have a hidden column like the places table, so it's not clear how to support it, or what "hidden" means in the context of origins. I'm not actually sure when hidden is set, so I'd need to look into that. Maybe this isn't worth doing.
4. Modify the URL query so it doesn't autofill hidden URLs. Again, I'm not sure when hidden is set, so I'd need to look into that, and maybe this isn't worth doing.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Leaving alone < 0 frecency that should just not exist (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1618602), I suspect most of the problem is our lacking definition of zero frecency and the hidden field, we intermixed meanings between them to a point where it's a bit unclear what's the expected outcome and we have no documentation.
This bug should start investigating if zero frecency has any particolar meaning today and the hidden field usage.
Starting from there we should decide how to handle them in the future, and add to the source tree docs.

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I think I fixed most of the hidden cases when working on origin frecency, though it would be nice to document the meaning of these fields.