1896646 - URL bar does not recognize space-character in url bar as search-string when a "/" slash char is in the string (regarding URL or search term behavior)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Dan]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:125.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/125.0

Steps to reproduce:

Enter the following string into URL bar "bugzilla.mozilla.org/ example-search-term-here"
and press enter

Actual results:

bugzilla.mozilla.org is queried

Expected results:

Firefox should recognize that there is a space character between "/" and "example" and ignore the "/" slash icon and instead search for the string "bugzilla.mozilla.org/ example-search-term-here" on the user's set search engine. Currently a single "/" char in the string makes the URL bar ignore any space-bar characters (which should indicate to the URL bar that the user is entering a search string)

Comment 1

[Dan]

I am aware that adding "site:" in front of the string overwrites the URL bar's "/"-interpretation for a URL, but adding "site:" in front should not be required. (even when omitting "site" and only having ":" char at beginning of the entire string)

Comment 2

[Dan]

Fx 125 was already affected aswell.

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

That is a parsable url, if we make it a search someone will complain they want the opposite behavior. We must pick one, and since that really looks more like a URL than a search I think the current behavior is more common.

new URL("https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ example-search-term-here")

I tested other browsers, and they do the same, so if we'd do differently, we'd also break expectations of users that either migrate to Firefox, or use more than one browser.

Note you can force a search by prepending a question mark to the search string.

Comment 4

[Dan]

Ah interesting, thanks. Yeah I see the issue in that case. Are you aware of any about:debug command to adjust the behaviour? (a simple boolean would suffice in this case) sth. like "URL.bar.string.handling" or so for example?

Comment 5

[Dan]

*about:config I meant ofc.

Comment 6

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Most available prefs do the opposite, like always consider strings as URLs, instead of sending to a search engine. I am not aware of a pref to always consider strings a search (it would also go a bit against the privacy first part of the Manifesto). I can only suggest using the ? filter character for now. You can also use CTRL+K to directly start a forced search in the urlbar (provided the legacy serchbar is removed from the toolbar, otherwise CTRL+K goes there... it will still work anyway).

Comment 7

[Dan]

Thanks! For now I created an enhancement request with a very fitting pref name. Bug 1896986