1872607 - keyword.enabled suggests to execute a search if the typed string ends with *

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[Alan Jenkins]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:121.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/121.0

Steps to reproduce:

Use the address bar to search for a frequently-used bookmark, by typing words, including the * character as a separate word.

Actual results:

Case 1: The * character is the first word entered.

Recent Firefox recognizes this, and replaces the * with [Bookmarks x]. Smooth!

But I think something needs improving. When I enter "* ybs", the top entry is

Welcome to Yorkshire Building Society | YBS -- ybs.co.uk

All the entries below it (under Firefox Suggest) are marked with a * (bookmarked), and show the edited title of the bookmark, if it differs from the website title. But the top entry is not marked with a *, and it shows the website title, not the edited title of the bookmark.

Case 2: The * character is the very last word entered. This was my previous habit. It lets you do a full search including browser history, and then narrow it to bookmarks later if necessary.

In this case, the top search result is an option to "search with Google".

So I deliberately used the bookmark feature, but I have an extraneous non-bookmark result that I need to skip over first. It is an unfortunate slowdown.

Firefox has been the best browser for bookmarks. Bookmarks allow the user a lot of power, allowing them to decrease their dependency on a few giant search engines.

• The "search with Google" option happens even if default search engine is disabled in the address bar, by setting keyword.enabled=false in about:config.[1]
  • Clearly that part is "wrong", even if only a few people would notice.
  • This part only happens if the * character is the last word. It doesn't happen e.g. for "4 * 4". This doesn't feel intentional - maybe it's a simple coding error.
    [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-web-address-bar#w_turning-off-the-web-search-in-the-address-bar

Expected results:

Case 1:

[*] Welcome to Yorkshire Building Society | YBS [login page] -- ybs.co.uk

That is, the top result should be

1. marked with a *, like all the other bookmark results
2. should include the "[login]" that I edited in to the bookmark title, to mark that this is the page I use to login to YBS.

Case 2: It would be nice if "4 4 *" gave the same type of top result as "4 * 4", even when keyword.enabled=false. But, it might not be worth the hassle. If it was just made consistent, then the top result would be "Visit 4 4 *" / "Visit ybs *". Therefore, you would still have to skip over it. I would still appreciate the improvement, because it would fix the regression in keyword.enabled=false, and stop showing me a Google logo where I told Firefox I didn't want it.

Comment 1

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

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

Comment 2

[Ruben Mills]

also facing same how to solve this

Comment 3

[Daniel Bodea [:danibodea]]

There appear to be several enhancement suggestions in this report. I am not very confident in my understanding of them.
Alan, Could you help us clear this up?

I understand that there are several issues when setting the star () character at the beginning of a bookmark's name and also when setting the star () character at the end of a bookmark's name. Could you please explain which exact behavior you consider to be faulty?

I would like to explain a feature: If a user types the star character and a space character in the address bar ("* "), he will force the browser to search through the bookmarks only. This means that typing a star character and a space character will cause the address bar to show ALL your bookmarks as suggestions. If then, he also adds another star character, after the newly displayed "Bookmarks x", the address bar will suggest all bookmarks that contain the star character.

In your described case, typing the star character, then space, and then ybs ("* ybs") will cause the browser to search for all bookmarks that contain the string "ybs". By this logic, you should have a bookmark with the name "Welcome to Yorkshire Building Society | YBS -- ybs.co.uk". (no star character in the name) Can you make sure that you don't have a bookmark of the same website, but saved without the star character?

Regarding case 2, what bookmark name would you be searching with the keyword "4 * 4" or "4 4 *"? Thanks!

Comment 4

[Alan Jenkins]

Attachment: Screenshot from 2024-01-15 16-49-19.png

Hi Daniel. My apologies :-).

I don't use the asterix/star "at the beginning of a bookmark's name". I was trying to represent the screen. Instead, here is a screenshot of Case 1.

The fault is in the favicon of the first search result. After the first, the favicons are marked with a yellow star, because they are bookmarks.

The first result is also a web page that I have bookmarked. It is a good first search result. However, the favicon is not marked with a yellow star. And, the web page title does not include the extra text "[login page]", which I have edited in to that bookmark.

Comment 5

[Alan Jenkins]

Attachment: Screenshot from 2024-01-15 16-56-55.png

For comparison, here is a Case 2 screenshot.

In this case, you can see the bookmark I created for ybs.co.uk, and that the bookmark's title has been edited to include "[login"...

---

You can also see the first result is "search with google", despite me having tried to disable that feature. This is unfortunate, though not a huge priority :-).

"4 * 4" and "4 4 *" were followup test inputs. "4 * 4" represents someone trying to ask Google to multiply 4 by 4. That works on Firefox defaults, but not on my Firefox, because I specifically disabled it in about:config. This is expected.

My puzzle is why "4 4 *" would offer Google as an option, on my Firefox where both "4 4" and "4 * 4" do not offer Google as an option. I think this is not really intended to happen, e.g. "if" statements are in the "wrong" order in the code. But I understand the solution might not be quite so straightforward :-).

I hope that answers your helpful questions.

Comment 6

[Daniel Bodea [:danibodea]]

Thank you for the clarifications! I am confident I understand your suggestions. The steps to reproduce are as follows:

• Case1:

1. load the login page of ybs.co.uk
2. save it as a bookmark with its default name
3. in a new tab type asterix+spacebar in the addressbar (forces to search bookmarks)
4. then also type in "ybs"
   Actual:
   Result 1 is not a bookmark, but an "origin autofil". (because it does not have a star in its icon, nor does it have the whole link previously saved as a bookmark)
   Result 2 is the desired bookmark.
   Expected:
   The first result should not be displayed at all.

• Case2:

1. load the login page of ybs.co.uk
2. save it as a bookmark with its default name
3. in a new tab type "ybs"
4. then a spacebar and asterix (" *")
   Actual:
   Result 1 is a suggestion to search the string with the default search engine.
   Result 2 is the desired bookmark.
   Expected:
   The first result should not be displayed.

I am confirming this report as an enhancement.
Thank you for your contribution!

Comment 7

[Alan Jenkins]

Thanks again for your work.

I would like to edit your Case 1 slightly. My results are slightly different and more surprising than yours. Probably because I was still unclear! I now also reproduced my results using a fresh Firefox profile:

Case1:

1. load the page: https://www.ybs.co.uk

2. save it as a bookmark with its default name

3. in a new tab type asterix+spacebar in the addressbar (forces to search bookmarks)

4. then also type in "ybs"
   Actual:
   Result 1 is not a bookmark, but an "origin autofill". (because it does not have a star in its icon, nor does it have the whole link previously saved as a bookmark)
   There is no second result :-). And so, specifically, there is no result showing the details of the bookmark, that exists for "https://www.ybs.co.uk". It appears the bookmark result has been considered a duplicate of result 1, and hence not included in the list of results.

   Expected:
   The search results show that a bookmark exists for "https://www.ybs.co.uk". Including a star in the favicon, and showing any edits which have been made to the name of the bookmark.

Comment 8

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to Alan Jenkins from comment #7)

Result 1 is not a bookmark, but an "origin autofill". (because it does not have a star in its icon, nor does it have the whole link previously saved as a bookmark)

There is no second result :-). And so, specifically, there is no result showing the details of the bookmark, that exists for "https://www.ybs.co.uk". It appears the bookmark result has been considered a duplicate of result 1, and hence not included in the list of results.

This is the expected outcome at this time, there's likely a bug around to show a star for the autofill result, but anyway we do deduplication, and since the url is the same, there's no reason to keep both results.

The problem here is keyword.enabled handling, it should never present a search default option, that's definitely a bug due to some code not considering it appropriately.