1964390 - The Non Sponsored suggestions are available on all regions and have broken favicon

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P1)

Description

[Cosmin Muntean [:cmuntean], Ecosystem QA]

Attachment: non sposnored all regions.mp4

[Affected versions]:

• Release 138.0.1 (Build ID: 20250430203103)
• Beta 139.0b3 (Build ID: 20250502090704)
• Nightly 140.0a1 (Build ID: 20250502094430)

[Affected Platforms]:

• Windows 10 x64
• macOS 15.2
• Ubuntu 22.04 x64

[Prerequisites]:

• Have the latest version of Nightly 139.0a1 build installed.
• Have the following prefs set in the about:config page:
• browser.search.region = RO (or any other regions besides the US and GB)
• browser.urlbar.quicksuggest.enabled = true
• browser.urlbar.suggest.quicksuggest.sponsored = true
• browser.urlbar.suggest.quicksuggest.nonsponsored = true
• browser.urlbar.quicksuggest.settingsUi = 2

[Steps to reproduce]:

1. Open the browser with the profile from the prerequisites.
2. Type in the address bar a keyword that triggers a non-sponsored suggestion (eg: william shakespeare).
3. Observe the suggestions.

[Expected result]:

• No Non-Sponsored suggestion is triggered.

[Actual result]:

• A Non-Sponsored suggestion is triggered and has the favicon broken.

[Notes]:

• The issue is NOT reproducible for the US and GB regions.
• Attached is a screen recording of the issue.

Comment 1

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Thanks for filing this Cosmin, sorry that I haven't done a good job communicating the expected behavior. Except for the favicon problem, this is expected. There are two important points:

• As long as Suggest overall is enabled for a client, Wikipedia suggestions should also be enabled. That includes all planned expansion regions (us, uk, pl, it, de, fr)
• Their language depends on your browser's locale, not its browser.search.region. (That is not the case for some other suggestion types like AMP, which are based on your region)

Your video shows that your Firefox build is using an English locale, so that's why you see English Wikipedia suggestions.

RS prod has Wikipedia suggestions for the following languages: en, pl, it, de, fr. If you set your app locale to any locale that uses one of those languages, you should see suggestions appropriate for that language.

Technically, Suggest uses Services.locale.appLocaleAsBCP47 to determine your browser's locale. There are other notions of the user's locale too (f.e. there's a separate web content l10n pref exposed in about:preferences) but that's the one we use. IIUC appLocaleAsBCP47 depends on your app build and/or installed language packs but I'm not totally sure.

Re: the favicon, I've fixed that. It was a problem in RS due to its record being filtered only to us, ca, and gb. I've removed that filter so it should now be ingested regardless of the client's region.

I'll leave this bug open for now and let you close it if you can confirm you're seeing the expected behavior as I've described.

Comment 2

[Cosmin Muntean [:cmuntean], Ecosystem QA]

Hi Drew!

Thanks for providing this information, it's clearer now how Wikipedia results work.

I just verified and I can confirm the following:

• The Wikipedia (non-Sponsored) results are available only if the Firefox browser's locale is set to the following: en-US, en-CA, en-GB, IT, FR, DE and PL.
• The Wikipedia (non-Sponsored) results are NOT available if the browser's locale is different than the ones mentioned above.
• The Wikipedia (non-Sponsored) favicon is correctly displayed on all supported locales. Tested on FIrefox Release 138, Beta 139.0b10 and latest Nightly 140.0a1.

Considering these, I'm marking this bug as verified-fixed.