294116 - URL bar autocomplete should match against each level of address

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: Location Bar, enhancement)

Description

[Aaron Lawrence]

Autocompletion searching in the URL bar seems to only selectively match certain
parts of domain names. It works fine for plain www.companyname.com searches, but:

I have visited www.semiconductors.philips.com. They use that domain directly
without redirecting.

However, when I type "phi" or even "philips" into the URL entry field, it does
NOT offer www.semiconductors.philips.com as a matching search option.

Comment 1

[Aaron Lawrence]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910

Comment 2

[Aaron Lawrence]

Retested on latest nightly, behaviour same.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050513

Comment 3

[Aaron Lawrence]

Another example: I just visited give.redcross.org.

But autocomplete does not find anything if I type "red".

Comment 4

[Andrew Schultz]

autocomplete strips off the scheme (http{,s}, ftp) and also "ftp" and "www" prefixes.  It doesn't try anything beyond that (like the domain itself).  Is that what you're requesting (match the domain?)

Or if the URL is http://abc.def.ghi.com/ are you suggesting that it match if you type "def" or even "com" or "f.g"?

Comment 5

[Aaron Lawrence]

OK, I checked some more. I see what you are saying; the autocomplete is quite trivial at the moment. As you say it strips the scheme and www. or ftp. off the front and then just matches the the first characters, regardless of how many levels deep that might be.

What should it do? The purpose of autocomplete is to let people get back to sites they have visited before quickly.

So in general, it should match all non-trivial parts of the server address - that is, everything except www/ftp on the front and the TLD. What it does now is not useful if a site uses sub-domains, which is very common. 

As I said in my example:
www.semiconductors.philips.com

Typing "phil", autocomplete will not match this entry. This seems obviously silly to me as I know I visited the "philips" website - if they happen to use subdomains why would I remember those instead?

Another example, if I have visited groups.google.com then typing "goog" does not match this. 

I changed the summary a bit to try and reflect this.

Comment 6

[zug_treno]

*** Bug 326764 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Nikitas Liogkas]

I'm proud to annouce the public release of version 1.0 of the Autocomplete Manager, which fixes this bug by means of an extension! The extension provides advanced features for the address Autocomplete framework in Firefox. Features include:
- matching against page titles
- matching against bookmark addresses and bookmark names
- matching any part of the domain name
- various sorting criteria for suggested entries, including alphabetical, most-frequently-visited and most-recently-visited
- resorting the suggestion list on the fly according to different criteria
- showing/hiding page titles and visit counts
- setting the number of visible entries on the popup
- define the truncation for long addresses
- numerous fixes for Autocomplete-related bugs

The extension can also function as a rudimentary History Manager. More details, as well as the installation package, are available at http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~nikitas/acmanager

Please let me know of any suggestions/bugs.

Thank you!

Comment 8

[Aaron Lawrence]

Nikitas: this sounds good and I will try. However I believe that autocomplete is a very core part of Moz/SM/FF and should work usefully out of the box.

Here is another example:
I have been reading pages on the English wikipedia. They are all at en.wikipedia.org. Because of the crappy matching, typing "wiki" in the URL bar doesn't match any of them :(

Comment 9

[Aaron Lawrence]

Oh. Only for Firefox at the moment. I use Seamonkey :( Yeap, I see it is on the list...

Comment 10

[Nikitas Liogkas]

(In reply to comment #8)
> Nikitas: this sounds good and I will try. However I believe that autocomplete
> is a very core part of Moz/SM/FF and should work usefully out of the box.
> 
> Here is another example:
> I have been reading pages on the English wikipedia. They are all at
> en.wikipedia.org. Because of the **** matching, typing "wiki" in the URL bar
> doesn't match any of them :(
> 

I completely agree. But until they fix this in the core code, we'll have to do something else, no? :)

Comment 11

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

aaron, I claim that with #389491, this is now fixed.

Comment 12

[Aaron Lawrence]

Certainly looks that way, Seth. Thanks!