2016227 - Firefox study breaks homepage search bar

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 2017049

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, defect)

Description

[Dave Glowny]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:147.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/147.0

Steps to reproduce:

For those who have preferred using the "Search the web" entry field in the Firefox home page, it seems like a recent experiment broke this feature and it now redirects your searches to the main address bar.

Some of you may recall this behavior was controlled by the about:config setting "browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.improvesearch.handoffToAwesomebar", and you could set this option to false to keep your searches within the home page widget rather than automatically jumping to the main address bar.

The study that broke this feature is "New Tab 149.1.20260121.51415 to Release 147.0.3", and after turning that study off in about:studies you can get back the old behavior - at least for now!

But really someone should fix the underlying problem here, before this experimental study eventually goes into the mainstream code.

Actual results:

With the study "New Tab 149.1.20260121.51415 to Release 147.0.3" enabled, and the user has their configuration as "browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.improvesearch.handoffToAwesomebar" = false, then attempts to search from the Firefox home page "Search the web" widget are being mistakenly redirected to happen within the main address bar.

Expected results:

When "browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.improvesearch.handoffToAwesomebar" = false, then attempts to search from the Firefox home page "Search the web" widget should be handled the that widget, and they should NOT be redirected to happen within the main address bar.

Comment 1

[Dave Glowny]

Expected results should say:

When "browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.improvesearch.handoffToAwesomebar" = false, then attempts to search from the Firefox home page "Search the web" widget should be handled locally by that widget, and they should NOT be redirected to happen within the main address bar.

Comment 2

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

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

Comment 3

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Hi Dave,

This is an intentional change. As part of a larger refactor of our search UI, we removed the non-default (and unsupported) non-handoff mode from the search input on New Tab. This is letting us clean up the surrounding code (which had deep tendrils into New Tab) so that the Search team can work on and eventually land in an inline search experience later this year which will replace the current handoff mode.

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1999334#c1 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1999334#c5 for more details.

Comment 5

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2017049#c7