295884 - (Option to) disable "I'm feeling lucky" Google search in address bar for Mac builds

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Shell Integration, defect)

Description

[Ryan Schmidt]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

From Safari, Internet Explorer and every other browser I've used on the
Macintosh, I expect, when I type "example" into the location bar and press
Return, that I'm taken to "http://www.example.com/". I do not expect for a
Google search of "example" to be performed and to be shown the first result.

Camino 0.8.4 and Mozilla 1.8b1 both meet my expectations in this regard, while
Firefox 1.0.4 does not.

Actually I expect that the browser would first try "http://example/" and, if
that fails, then try "http://www.example.com/", and if that fails, then display
an error dialog. Firefox seems to do the first part of this, but then goes to
the Google search.

I have read in bug 233853 that I can apparently hold Control while pressing
Enter to skip the Google searching and instead go to www.example.com. However
this does not work on my Mac. (By the way, even if I were on a PC where this
feature presumably works, I'm not sure how I was meant to discover that it exists.)

If the behavior of searching Google and returning the first result is deemed
useful and will not be removed entirely, then there needs to be an option to
turn it off, and it needs to be off by default in the Mac build of Firefox, to
match Macintosh user expectations.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Access the URL "example"
Actual Results:  
A Google search for "example" is performed and the first result (currently
"http://javascript.internet.com/") is shown.

Expected Results:  
I expected to see "http://www.example.com/".

Comment 1

[Jaime Mitchell (use [e-mail] for email)]

In about:config
Set keyword.enabled=false to turn it off.

-> WFM

If you are expecting this to be default then this will be WontFix as per simular
bugs. 
Also if you are asking for an options menu setting for this then at would also
be WontFix.

Comment 2

[Ryan Schmidt]

Thank you for showing me how to turn off the option. Sorry for the dupe; I had
searched for half an hour and did not find any similar bugs.

As for not making this the default for Mac builds, that's certainly your call.
Just so long as you knowingly do this against user expectations. I know that the
current goal for Firefox is to be the best Windows browser, and an acceptable
Mac browser. You've taken over many behaviors from Internet Explorer for
Windows, and that's fine for that target audience. But if you ever decide that
you want to be the best Mac browser, then it would be useful to examine the
behaviors of Mac browsers, and take over some of their behaviors, to ease the
transition for users used to those other browsers.