186965 - Home Page and Search Page URLs with %s should always dynamically replace %s with value of address field

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Camino Graveyard :: Location Bar & Autocomplete, enhancement)

Description

[Cortland Klein]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021226 Chimera/0.6+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021226 Chimera/0.6+

If The Home Page and/or Search Page URL(s) contain %s, Chimera should always
dynamically replace %s with value of address field when they are used,
regardless of what is in it. If The Home Page and/or Search Page URL(s) do not
contain %s, then when they are used, simply load the URL as currently done.
Currently, URLs with %s simply literally use %s when used.

There would be no complication with the novice, for that person wouldn't
experiance the feature if the URL(s) didn't have %s in them.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Jason Deraleau]

> There would be no complication with the novice, for that person wouldn't
> experiance the feature if the URL(s) didn't have %s in them.


s/experiance/experience/

This could be bad. What if the novice user doesn't know about this function and
goes to put in their corporate site's search engine URL? Maybe it contains a %s
in the query string, the user would get unpredictable behavior.

Comment 2

[Cortland Klein]

Lets just hope that the user doesn't have a URL that has a %s in it? Or perhaps
an opthon, however the idea is to have the user not have to deal with it if that
user doesn't know about it.

Comment 3

[Sören 'Chucker' Kuklau (gone)]

> Maybe it contains a %s in the query string

As I've just explained on the mailing list, the % sign must be escaped in URLs
(as %25), as it is the character to escape special characters in URLs (such as
%20 = <space>).

Therefore confirming this bug, although I believe the home page doesn't need
this feature.

Comment 4

[Jason Deraleau]

> As I've just explained on the mailing list, the % sign must be escaped in URLs
> (as %25), as it is the character to escape special characters in URLs (such as
> %20 = <space>).

:) One step ahead of me. I'd thought of this as I was going to bed last night.
Thanks!

Comment 5

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

See also bug 186964.

Comment 6

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 168964 ***

Comment 7

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

This is actually not a dup. Bug 186964 is about allowing the homepage to be a
bookmark keyword. This bug is about using the contents of the URL bar as a
search term.

Comment 8

[Jesse]

>This bug is about using the contents of the URL bar as a search term.

Or more precisely, this bug allows a string containing %s to be typed directly
into the search page or home page preference and processed in a similar manner
as running a search via keyword in the Location box.

Note I say "typed DIRECTLY into the search page or home page preference". i.e.
if I were to type www.google.com/search?q=%s into my search page preference.

This differs from bug #186964 in that bug #186964 merely allows the use of
keywords to be processed in the search page and home page preferences in a
similar manner as using keywords in the Location box. Bug #186964 would NOT
allow www.google.com/search?q=%s to operate properly if literally typed into the
search page or home page preference. Rather bug #186964 would require
www.google.com/search?q=%s to be created as a bookmark, keyword the bookmark,
then use the keyword in home page or search page preferences. Similar, but more
involved and not quite the same as this bug (#186965).

Comment 9

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

Ping.

Wow, long hold up. Anyone have any thoughts on this? With a search bar, I'm not
sure why we'd need the location bar to be used as a second search bar. I suggest
WONTFIX. Simon, what do you think?

Comment 10

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

This sounds like a geek feature.

Comment 11

[Stuart Morgan]

Unless I'm misunderstanding, this doesn't apply any more. There's the search plist now instead of a pref for a search page, which does support %s (and having the behavior of Home depend on what you happen to have in the current window's location bar doesn't make sense).

Closing, but feel free to re-open if I am not understanding the request correctly.