205158 - order of search history in search box is unintuitive

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[Simon Willison]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030504 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030504 Mozilla Firebird/0.6

The search history for the top right search box is alphabetical and case
sensitive. It would be far more useful if it was ordered by when the search was
made, with the most recent search at the top of the list. I often find myself
wanting to repeat a recent search without remembering the exact search terms I
entered.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use the search box a few times
2. Place the cursor in it and hit the "down" key
Actual Results:  
The list of previous searches was ordered alphabetically, taking case in to
account (so entries starting with A-Z came before entries starting with a-z)


Expected Results:  
Order searches by the time they were made.

Comment 1

[noririty]

This change would be increase of easiness to use.

I suggest confirm this bug.

Comment 2

[Erik]

Might this RFE somehow be related to - or perhaps also covered by bug #182366?

Comment 3

[Jason M. Abels]

I first was going to mark this as a Duplicate of bug 182366. However, it appears
that bug only addresses the URL bar. This "feature" also appears in the form
manager and in the search bars. It may be that the code used to fix 182366 may
also apply to this bug, but it's doubtful that all three rely on the same piece
of code. 

Confirming bug, and making it dependent on bug 182366

Comment 4

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

Taking QA Contact

Comment 5

[Thomas]

Attachment: my search

I browsed some random (not alphabetically sorted) sites and if I did things
right they are sorted historically

Comment 6

[AndrewM]

The trunk builds of Firefox (and Firefox 3 when it is released) use a new "frecency" algorithm (a combination of frequency and recency) to sort auto-complete entries. For more info, see bug 394038 and http://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Mconnor/PlacesFrecency.

Comment 7

[Ryan Flint [:rflint] (ping via IRC for reviews)]

Search history is now sorted using an algorithm similar to the location bar's: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/Awesomeformcomplete

Comment 8

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

Ryan, does it mean it has been fixed by bug 370117?

Comment 9

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

yes. search bar autocomplete uses the same backend as form autocomplete.

Comment 10

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

Thanks Gavin. Adding dependency.