300650 - Single search-term in address-bar searches by default using search.netscape.com

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Mark Edgington]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

When typing a single search-term into the address/location bar, the search is
always carried out by search.netscape.com (there seems to be no way of altering
this).  If more than one search-term is entered in, an "I'm feeling lucky"
search is performed using google.

The search method that is used when words are entered into the location bar
should be configurable, and should be consistent for single or multiple-terms
(when not using specific keywords (i.e. not using 'google' or 'dict' as the
first word)).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Type in 'test' (without quotes) in the location bar and press enter
2.  Type in 'test test' (without quotes) in the location bar and press enter

(this assumes that 'test' is not a keyword registered with the browser (as
'google' and 'dict' are))
Actual Results:  
1.  Goes to
http://search.netscape.com/ns/search?fromPage=nsBrowserRoll&query=test page
2.  Goes to same page which doing a google "i'm feeling lucky" search on "test
test" goes to

Expected Results:  
Assuming that there is a setting available to choose what the 'non-keyword'
search behavior should be, and that this setting is set to "google i'm feeling
lucky search", then the results should be:
1.  Go to "i'm  feeling lucky" page for "test"
2.  Go to "i'm  feeling lucky" page for "test test"  <performed as expected>

Comment 1

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

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b3) Gecko/20050713
Firefox/1.0+ ID:2005071306

WFM

Maybe an extension is causing this? Try in firefox safe mode:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Safe_mode

Comment 2

[Adam Guthrie]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b3) Gecko/20050712 Firefox/1.0+
ID:2005071214

Works for me. Firefox goes to the first site listed in the Google search as
expected. 

Comment 3

[Mark Edgington]

Ok, my bad.  I've identified the problem -- I was using the Proxomitron as a 
http proxy, and it had a header-filter in operation which performed the 
netscape keyword search.

However, I did notice that when this filter is turned off, the request for 
something like a single term "test" times out looking for http://test/ whereas 
with a multiple term query (i.e. "test test"), the google-lucky search is 
performed.  I noticed similar behavior in IE, so perhaps there is no way to 
avoid this difference between single and multiple-term queries when using a 
http proxy?

Is this behavior correct? -- I suspect the situation is that firefox must pass 
on the request to the proxy as a URL, and firefox cannot know if there exists a 
DNS record for the so-called URL (this is handled by the proxy), so when the 
proxy says "sorry, I couldn't reach that URL", firefox must pass this info onto 
the user instead of second-guessing the proxy and performing a google query.  
Of course there could be an option to change this behavior in Firefox, but I 
can't decide if that would be a good idea.