1859018 - address bar-based doesn't let you web search with a query beginning with percent sign

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Tyler]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/118.0

Steps to reproduce:

I clicked into the address bar and typed a search query that began with the percent sign (%).

Actual results:

Firefox automatically replaced my % sign with a "tabs" button indicating the search query would only be searching my open tabs. This is not what I wanted. I deleted the tabs filter and tried to re-add

Expected results:

Firefox should do one of the following (in my personal order of preference):

A) not auto-filter address bar searches to Tabs when beginning with any valid beginning character of a search query (including, but not limited to, the percent (%) symbol)
B) respect/remember that a user doesn't want to filter to Tabs when they delete the Tabs filter and persist/prevent it from re-applying the filter automatically when a user deletes the filter and re-types the percent symbol.
C) allow users to disable this setting somewhere in the UI and indicate where that setting is on hover of the filter button

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

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

[Stephanie Cunnane [:scunnane]]

The behavior you're experiencing is slightly confusing but it is the currently expected behavior. One workaround is to type your search term and enclose it within quotation marks. We have a proposal to remedy this situation by allowing searching via @tabs.