1877530 - URLs should not be sent to search engine

Status: NEW

(Firefox for Android :: Search, defect, P3)

Description

[mozilla]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:122.0) Gecko/122.0 Firefox/122.0
Firefox for Android

Comment 1

[mozilla]

When I enter an URL which contains a space character it is aleays sent to search engine also when starting with https://. I previously used Samsung browser and it correctly called the url. It works when I use %20 instead of space characters.

Please fix: Anything properly starting with a know URL start should not be sent to the search engine and called directly instead even when it contains spaces. Sending marked URLs to the search is unexpected behaviour.

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

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

Comment 3

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:skhan, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 4

[Mira Lobontiu (Android QA)]

Thank you for the report!

Could you provide some problematic URLs?
Also, the device you tested on.

Comment 5

[mozilla]

https://books.stoecker.eu/author/Gaiman, Neil when entering manually which then is sent as "https://books.stoecker.eu/author/Gaiman,%20Neil" (or not encoded with " ", the server accepts both variants).

Comment 6

[mozilla]

Device: Samsung Galaxy XCover 5 with Android 13

I though that's somewhere in the report, as I created the report on the device with Firefox, so that any relevant info gets submitted. Would have been much easier to make a report on my normal computer.

Comment 7

[Mira Lobontiu (Android QA)]

Thank you!
I was able to reproduce it on both Nightly 125.0a1, and 123.0 with Samsung Galaxy S24 (Android 14).
Manually writing "https://books.stoecker.eu/author/Gaiman, Neil" redirects me to the search engine on Firefox, but not on Chrome.
I'll confirm this ticket.

Comment 8

[Denis Müller [:Webworkr]]

In principle, I agree with this bug report.

However, with reference to bug 1892563 as an example, I would like to point out that there are certainly use cases in which it makes sense to send the complete URL to a search provider.
Such scenarios should be considered in the solution so that all needs are taken into account in the end.

Comment 9

[mozilla]

In the strange case that a complete URL should be searched the proper solution would be to go to the search page directly and enter the URL there instead of relying on a web browser to forward the search. A web browsers main purpose is to display data, not to forward searches.

Comment 10

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

On Firefox desktop entering the url https://books.stoecker.eu/author/Gaiman, Neil visits the URL.

However you can still search for it, by going into search mode (selecting the engine from the bottom of the address bar), and then entering the URL.

That seems a reasonable mix which also takes account of user expectations.

Comment 11

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Can Firefox Android use the same code (via GeckoView) that desktop uses to differentiate URLs from search queries?

Comment 12

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

I suspect not at the moment as most of it is specific to the desktop implementation of the address bar. Marco might know more.

Comment 13

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away 10-21 August)]

Desktop pretty much uses the URIFixup module, that for the most part trusts the URI parser, in the sense in most cases it will put a protocol in front of the string and see if it resolves to a valid URI. It also does some typo correction for common protocols, or public suffixes. Flags can be used to adapt behavior.