1784304 - Too difficult to access search suggestions

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P5)

Description

[adam.semenenko]

Attachment: Screenshot 2022-08-11 at 18.07.36.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:103.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/103.0

Steps to reproduce:

It's really annoying to try and access the search suggestions because they're placed the furthest possible distance away from my cursor.

When I type 'example', I can see the link to GitHub in the middle of the list. There are some random search suggestions at the top of the drop down list, which takes around 10 down-arrow keypresses to access. If I use the up arrow, it also takes 10 key presses as the "this time search with" buttons are selectable.

In Chrome there's no "this time search with" buttons, so I can access the correct results much more quickly, usually with 1 or 2 up-arrow key presses.

Comment 1

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

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Search' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

In preferences/options, you can go to Search -> Search Suggestions, and in that section there is a Show search suggestions ahead of browsing history in address bar results option. If you turn that off, does that help your use case?

Comment 3

[adam.semenenko]

Show search suggestions ahead of browsing history in address bar results helps make the suggestions more accessible, but it makes the Google search suggestions more inacessible.

Comment 4

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

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:adw, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 5

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Something has to be at the bottom of the list, so I'm not sure what we can do here. We could interleave search suggestions with bookmarks and history but we don't have a sound way to do that and something would still end up at the bottom. The search shortcut buttons are here to stay for now, but you can turn them all off by going to about:preferences#search and unchecking everything in the Search Shortcuts list. You can also use the Tab key to move the selection just inside the suggestions list, skipping the shortcut buttons. If you want to move in reverse, press Shift-Tab.

Does turning off the shortcut buttons or using Tab fix this for you? If not I'm not sure what else we can do.

Comment 6

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

If you find the shortcut buttons useful, you can turn them off and still get the same functionality a couple other ways. You can enter search mode for bookmarks, history, and tabs by typing *, ^, and % respectively, followed by a space. You can enter search mode for Wikipedia by typing the beginning of its domain name (en.wikipedia.org for English) and then hit Tab to select the "Search with Wikipedia" result.

Comment 7

[Monica Chiorean]

Shouldn't this be an enhancement rather than a defect? Thank you.

Comment 8

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

I'll just resolve this as incomplete. There's not anything actionable here and we've provided some workarounds and alternatives. We don't have any plans right now to dramatically alter the urlbar UI.