1836319 - Firefox's Trending Search Suggestion keep showing up, even after I un-tick "Show search suggestions in address bar results"

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

STR:

1. In Firefox Nightly (which has trending search suggestions enabled per bug 1832060), hit Ctrl+K. Take a look at the dropdown/popup. (You'll see some "trending search suggestions" dropping down from the address bar.)
2. Now suppose you'd like to turn those off. Go Firefox Preferences and type "suggestion" into the filter searchbar.
3. Un-tick the checkbox Show search suggestions in address bar results.
4. Repeat step 1.

ACTUAL RESULTS:
I'm still seeing trending search suggestions appearing in a dropdown from my address bar.

EXPECTED RESULTS:
Perhaps the suggestions should've gone away.

Note, the suggestions do go away if I instead uncheck "Provide search suggestions" (modulo bug 1836325 making that confusing in today's Nightly in particular)

I see daleharvey mentioned the lack of UI for configuring these in https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D177498#5852359 -- dale, do you know if that's tracked somewhere? Did we want to add that before letting these get to early-beta (as they will next week)? I'm a bit concerned that users will un-tick one or the other checkbox, see that the suggestions remain, and conclude that the feature is broken/being-pushed-on-them (without realizing that they just need to go and un-tick one additional checkbox).

Comment 1

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(In reply to Daniel Holbert [:dholbert] from comment #0)

I'm a bit concerned that users will un-tick one or the other checkbox, see that the suggestions remain, and conclude that the feature is broken/being-pushed-on-them (without realizing that they just need to go and un-tick one additional checkbox).

Actually -- on closer inspection, it looks like the higher-up checkbox ("Provide Search Suggestions") is un-ticked by default. (I've now edited the STR to include explicitly ticking it in step 3.)

That makes this slightly-less of a footgun I suppose, since users who go to this preferences UI to try to turn off this feature will, by-default, only have one box to un-tick, rather than two (since one of them is already un-ticked).

Comment 2

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(In reply to Daniel Holbert [:dholbert] from comment #1)

Actually -- on closer inspection, it looks like the higher-up checkbox ("Provide Search Suggestions") is un-ticked by default

er, it's un-ticked by default in Firefox Nightly 115, but it's ticked by default in Firefox Release. That seems to be a broken initial state, to some extent... I'll file a separate bug on that.

Comment 3

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

I filed bug 1836325 on "Provide Search Suggestions" being un-ticked by default -- that seems to be a mistake with our UI not showing the true state of things, and in fact it's really enabled-by-default.

Comment 4

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(suggestion: for now, to avoid confusion from bug 1836325 [which is new in today's Nightly and makes it confusing to reason about the settings interactions for this bug here], it may be clearer to to use mozregression-launched-Nightly 2023-05-31 when testing this bug here. I've also further-clarified comment 0's STR now that it's clear that the Provide Search Suggestions checkbox was mistakenly shown as un-checked, per bug 1836325)

Comment 5

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: screencast showing the issue

Here's a screencast showing the issue (captured in 5/31 Nightly to avoid confusion from the other bug that I mentioned)

At 6s, I uncheck the "show search suggestions in address bar results" checkbox, but the search suggestions remain.

At 13s, I uncheck "Provide search suggestions" and that does actually remove the trending search terms.

(This sort-of makes sense, but it's confusing since these preference checkboxes are arguably mislabeled. I think really our label "...in address bar results" really means to say "...for not-strictly-'search'-flavored text entered into the address bar". A typical user won't really understand that distinction, though.)

I should perhaps spin off a separate bug about that and maybe this should just be closed in favor of that bug. (modulo the fact that it's got new significance/relevance due to these preferences having some control over this new trending-search experience as well)

Comment 6

[Dale Harvey (:daleharvey)]

Trending suggestions are covered by the top level "suggest.searches" pref and the seperate entry for trending should clarify exactly which checkboxes cover trending suggestions or not so closing out although I filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1851449 to fix the UI issue with trending checkbox not being disabled