1845030 - entering "abc.xyz/ 123" in address bar opens website instead of searching for "abc.xyz/ 123" on the default search engine

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Dan]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. enter "abc.xyz/ 123" in url bar
2. press enter

Actual results:

website "abc.xyz" opens.

Expected results:

just like when using the string "abc.xyz 123" without the "/" char, "abc.xyz/ 123" should search the default search engine for "abc.xyz/ 123".

Comment 1

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

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

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

xyz is a valid public suffix, so abc.xyz is a valid domain. We should decide whether a non-encoded whitespace in the path should be accepted.
One side, accepting whitespaces may help users mistyping a url, historically we have often followed that path.
On the other side, whitespaces should always be encoded (but we should make an exception for javascript: urls).

So what matters here is understanding what's the most common user expectation in these cases.

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I must also note Chrome and Edge consider this a URL, like we do. So to reduce user surprise when switching browsers, we may have to wontfix it.