258838 - Make Google 'Browse by Name' default keyword.URL for Location Bar

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement)

Description

[Gids Goldberg]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3

I would love Google's new Browse by Name feature to be the default keyword.URL
for Firefox, you can read all about it at
http://toolbar.google.com/bbn_help.html and since Jesse found the URL (see the
Bug URL) it shouldn't be too difficult to change.
As I see it there are a number of pros and cons to this change:

+Mis-typed words won't send you to a potentially not nice URL, instead Google
will try to correct you on its search page
+Likewise, general terms typed in the Location Bar won't take you somewhere
unexpected
+If Browse by Name doesn't go straight to a page when certain keywords are used
a user could always override it using a Bookmarks Keyword
+Provides a strong compromise to those who want to see a normal Google Search
being default

-Behaviour's not 100% predictable
-New documentation and explaination is needed, see
http://www.squarefree.com/browse-by-name.png
- Google uses a special cursor to show when a user is being taken to a URL, we
might have to do something similar (more work.)



Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

We discussed this on the aviary list already when Jesse posted that.  The
conclusion was that it is too conservative in its results, and doesn't really
achieve what we want to achieve with the default search.

Flipside to that, I would argue that this is better behaviour for the default
Google search bar lookup, and if someone creates a modified sherlock plugin to
use this search style, I'd advocate for putting that into the build in place of
the default search.

Comment 2

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

Bug 323801 implemented this idea in Firefox 2.