2031099 - Spaces encoded without + in URL with Custom Search Engines

Status: RESOLVED MOVED

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

Description

[sergegardien]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:149.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/149.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open about:config.
2. Search for browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh.
3. Click the + button to enable the preference.
4. Navigate to about:preferences#search.
5. Click the Add button to create a new search engine.
6. Add a Google custom search engine with the following URL:
   https://www.google.com/search?q=%s
7. Perform a search using multiple terms, for example:
   This is a test
8. Copy and paste the resulting URL from the address bar into another application or text field.

Actual results:

The resulting URL contains literal spaces instead of encoded ones. For example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=This is a test

Because the spaces are not encoded, copying and pasting the URL into other applications may cause it not to be recognized as a single valid link.

This issue is similar to, but distinct from, the previously resolved bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1948541

Expected results:

Spaces in the search query should be encoded using +, as in previous Firefox behavior. The resulting URL should be:

https://www.google.com/search?q=This+is+a+test

Encoding spaces with + ensures the URL is valid and recognized correctly when copied and pasted or shared.

Comment 1

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

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

Comment 2

[Chris Bellini (:cbellini)]

Is the value of the browser.urlbar.decodeURLsOnCopy pref currently set to true (which would keep the spaces in the URL)?

Also note that browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh in the STR's in Step 2 is no longer needed, as this capability is available broadly 🙂

Comment 3

[sergegardien]

I've checked browser.urlbar.decodeURLsOnCopy, and it is set to false. Despite that, the copied URL still contains literal spaces instead of encoded ones.

Thanks for the clarification regarding browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh.

Comment 4

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Unfortunately we're not able to reproduce this. So a few additional questions:

• Does this reproduce if you're pasting back into Firefox onto a page?
• Does it happen with the Google search engine that's provided by Firefox?
• Does it happen with a fresh profile?

Comment 5

[sergegardien]

To answer your questions:

1. yes
2. I don't have anymore the Google Search Engine provided by Firefox and I cannot find an easy way to re-add it without resetting all the search engines I configured
3. Actually with a fresh profile everything looks fine.

That said, the profile where I've seen the issue has been created from scratch not long ago to fix some unrelated issues I was having. I have applied some changes to the about:config of this profile and installed some extensions (noscript, ublock, etc.) but the issue with the space encoding appeared out of the blue after a version update of Firefox, otherwise it was absent.

Comment 6

[sergegardien]

I tried the Troubleshooting Mode and the problem disappeared so I figured it was caused by an extension and indeed it was this one:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/clearurls/

Comment 7

[sergegardien]

I just reported this bug on the GitHub issue page of the addon:
https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon/issues/511

Comment 8

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Thank you for identifying that. I'll mark this a moved to a different tracker, as this is not something in Firefox itself.