1790379 - Tolerate insignificant punctuation in the end of URL when possible.

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement, P5)

Description

[A B]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:104.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/104.0

Steps to reproduce:

1st test. Open fragment of text: http://microsoft.com.
2nd test. Open fragment of text: https://www.microsoft.com,
3rd test. Open fragment of text: https://www.microsoft.com;
4th test. Open fragment of text: https://www.microsoft.com:

Actual results:

1rd test. Redirect to https://www.microsoft.com and so on.
2nd test. Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site.
3rd test. Redirect to https://www.microsoft.com and so on.
4th test. Redirect to https://www.microsoft.com and so on.

Expected results:

Firefox should open URL http://microsoft.com and so on for all tests.

Make this a new setting if any questions will arise.

Consider punctuation in the widespread languages as well. Firefox should support punctuation in the widespread languages as well, not just English.

Comment 1

[A B]

Not all websites recognize URLs like Bugzilla. Users have to select the URL manually sometimes, but this can lead to errors when copying and pasting.

This doesn't matter for one person and several mistakes in their lifetime but matters for millions of users.

Comment 2

[Ardelean Oana, Desktop Test Engineering [:oardelean]]

Hy, thank you for you report!

I managed to reproduce on:

• Nightly 106.0a1;
• Firefox 105.0;
• Firefox 104.0;

Tested on:

• Windows 10;
• Ubuntu 22.04;
• macOS 12;

I'm setting this enhacement as NEW so the developers can take a look at it.

Comment 3

[Ardelean Oana, Desktop Test Engineering [:oardelean]]

Setting the Compoment to "Address Bar". Please change it if there is a better fit. Thank you.

Comment 4

[James Teow [:jteow]]

It is a fair point that people will sometimes paste characters after a URL which don't belong there, but we have to be careful about automatically correcting strings since some characters might have a purpose, due to the spec or established norms like usage on intranets.

A safer option might be to be more helpful on the error page. Upon encountering an error, we could first attempt to correct the URL, do a DNS lookup to verify that the fix is valid, and the present the correct URL as an option. That might be better than just saying "We're having trouble finding that site."

We should also have UX take a look at the proposed solution.