1812108 - Increase Awesomebar history search suggestion limit

Status: NEW

(Firefox for Android :: History, enhancement)

Description

[Christian Sadilek [:csadilek]]

From github: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/27504.

Steps to reproduce

1. use for some time make a lot of history urls
2. type something to search for a specific but not recently/frequently used history urls
3. but it also matches other more recent history urls

Expected behaviour

Several matches should be shown as long as they exist.

Actual behaviour

Only three or less urls from history are shown.

I have a very good experience with Firefox on Desktop to search my visit history, but with Firefox on Android for the most of time I can't find my history urls because there are only three slots for them to show up (if I remember the exact url it can even autocomplete as I type). I can search and find them in the history listings but it takes too many touches to get there and is not the usual way Firefox has educated users to do things.

Device name

Sony Xperia XZ2 Compact

Android version

Android 10

Firefox release type

Firefox Nightly

Firefox version

108.0a1

Device logs

No response

Additional information

No response

┆Issue is synchronized with this Jira Task

Change performed by the Move to Bugzilla add-on.

Comment 1

[hussainabdul5236]

is increasing the history search result being considered by the team internally ? if yes, by how much. i'll like to work on the issue

Comment 2

[pishposh.mcgee]

Is there any movement on this issue? I have most of the other search suggestions turned off, so often I will only have the 3 history results and they are frequently not what I want. Think, sites like Twitter/X, if you enter a user handle it will give you 3 random tweet results but not the main profile result (which is just a truncated version of the tweet URLs). I have other sites where my input text matches a url in my history but I will get only 2 history results excluding the one I want.

Comment 3

[pishposh.mcgee]

To add to this, I occasionally will type in a string that matches dozens of more items in my history and will have zero autocomplete suggestions, then type an additional character and results will appear again. Without a knowledge of the codebase it seems like the suggestions are just all generated the same regardless of which types are to be shown, and FF just doesn't show the types that aren't selected in the settings. I suppose if you're really lazy that's a way to do it, but it certainly makes the setting pointless, and it makes for a bad experience of the user wants to do anything other than the heavy-handed suggestions of the developers.

Comment 4

[pishposh.mcgee]

Against all odds this behavior has gotten worse. In the most recent Beta version I will often see zero auto complete suggestions with a partial URL even if I enter the full domain name of a site I have visited thousands of times.

Comment 5

[Vlad Dreghici [:vdreghici]]

Thanks for reporting this. From what I understand, the max number of history suggestions that are shown is set to 3. This is a design choice which I cannot tell if it is a priority to be increased as of now, but I will update this ticket to better reflect what the enhancement is.

The second problem, If I understand correctly, is that sometimes when typing in the awesomebar, there are no Firefox suggestions displayed at all? I could not reproduce this issue in the last nightly (123.0a1) on an Android 13 Pixel7. I recommend opening a new ticket, detailing the issue, possibility adding a screen recording and linking it with this. Thank you!

Comment 6

[lindongbin]

What is the reason for the design limit of 3? I think this restriction should be lifted, and the results should be sorted by access time.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1813088

Comment 7

[lindongbin]

Or add an about:config parameter or option, it is up to the user to decide

Comment 8

[lindongbin]

The three search results currently displayed seem to be displayed based on the number of visits or other conditions. I think they should be sorted by visit time to facilitate user selection.

Comment 9

[Sören Hentzschel]

Or add an about:config parameter or option, it is up to the user to decide

about:config is not a thing on (stable releases of) Firefox for Android.

Comment 10

[Denis Müller [:Webworkr]]

I think this report is related to bug 1876864 "Bookmark/History Search: Search results limited".

Comment 11

[Petru-Mugurel Lingurar [:petru]]

Attachment: HistorySuggestionsVsResults.mp4

Seems like this report refers to awesomebar searches while the default search engine is selected in the search selector from the left.

Some things to note about this:

• the history results when the default search engine is selected are rather suggestions based on advanced heuristics (that desktop also uses) that take into account the frequency and recency of visits to a given URL. With only having a small space to display useful results this is an important feature for surfacing the most important URLs from the multitude of entries that might match.
  These suggestions are shown together with other result types so we currently show at most 3 such suggestions to ensure visibility and ease of reach for other results from other sources also - otherwise they would be pushed much more to the bottom and without an exercise of scrolling users might not even know of them.
• if interested in history results and not suggestions then user can use the search selector on the left to choose "History" and then the application will show up to 100 of the results that match.

Please refer to the attached recording to see the differences between history suggestions vs history results and how to get each of them.

Finding the best balance in surfacing the most useful search results while not cluttering the UI is hard as different users might have different expectations.
Will check within the team whether the number / results shown should be changed.
But in the meantime I'm curious from the reporters of this bug if knowing of and using the history provider for searches (from the selector to the left) helps to mitigate this issue.

Comment 12

[lindongbin]

Attachment: Screenshot_20250115-210410-544.png

Is it possible to add an option?

Comment 13

[pishposh.mcgee]

My particular frustration is that this behavior is fixed even if search suggestions are disabled. And the "at most 3" history suggestions means that in some cases it displays no suggestions at all.

Knowing that I can select the "History" item in the menu is helpful in the sense that I didn't realize that choice was there, but if you have several user-defined search engines you have to scroll down the list to choose "History", is at least 3 extra taps and feels very clumsy.

Comment 14

[lilydjwg]

Hi, I'm the original reporter.

Seems like this report refers to awesomebar searches while the default search engine is selected in the search selector from the left.

Yes. I didn't know changing the search selector would give me much more results. FYI I've turned off search suggestions (because I feel uncomfortable to know the search engine provider could know every time what webpage I were looking for). So there are only three results at most and a large blank space for me.

However I can't visit a URL directly when the search selector is "history" (my intended URL isn't in history so I would type it manually, primarily for wiki sites which have a very predictable URL). Also, switching the search selector every time is annoying.

Comment 15

[Petru-Mugurel Lingurar [:petru]]

Thank you for the feedback!
Happy to share that after syncing with more people about the related features it seems like plans are already being worked on for making history more relevant and provide users with options to get better results.