1956473 - On Firefox Home Page Web Search, "Change search settings" should be highlighted when seletected

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Search, defect, P3)

Description

[[e-mail]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:136.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/136.0

Steps to reproduce:

Every now and then when entering a search string into the Firefox Home Page Web Search it defaults to searching Settings after hitting the Enter key rather than the Web. What's worse it blanks the search string after Go Back a page and the original string has be type again. On the second attempt it works as normal.

This is most annoying especially when its a long string.

Also the "change search settings" option is redundant in this context and certainly a feature anyone wants if it causes this problem

Please remove "change search settings" option or add it to Settings > Search Shorts so it can be disabled

Actual results:

Search defaults to searching Settings after hitting the Enter key

Expected results:

It should search the web.

Comment 1

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

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

Comment 2

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Have you changed the hidden preference browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.improvesearch.handoffToAwesomebar to true?

If not, please can you attach a screenshot of the area where you are searching?

Comment 3

[[e-mail]]

browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.improvesearch.handoffToAwesomebar is set to false because I want to use the central Firefox home page search box and not the URL box. Apart from that I doubt it will support the underlying problem of it sometimes defaulting to search Settings cog or "Change System Settings".

I've found it is possible to simulate or force this default by pressing the up-arrow which puts the search on the last search option, i.e. "Change Search Settings" to see what I mean. Interestingly it does not highlight "Change Search Settings" so you visually see it is selected.

Ideally I'd like to see "Change Search Settings" added to the list of search shorcuts in Settings so it can be removed if not required like the other searches

Unfortunately I can't paste a screenshot of the "Firefox Home Search page" here but confident most people know what it looks like, i.e. blank page with Firefox icon and "Firefox" text in center of screen with search box underneath - not unlike like the Google search page

Comment 4

[James Teow [:jteow]]

So we're unlikely to remove "Change Search Settings" from being visible, but we do think it is misleading and confusing to not show the button highlighted when it has focus. Thus, I think we should change the title of the bug.

Comment 5

[Ina Popescu, Desktop QA]

I've managed to reproduce this issue by following the steps mentioned in Comment 0 and Comment 3 in Firefox 138.0.4 on Ubuntu 22.04. Updating the status to NEW.