360200 - Entering URL does search instead of trying to go to site

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Bill Samuel]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0

Putting certain Web addresses without www in them results in Firefox 2.0 doing a Google search rather than treating it as a URL.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. enter the URL
2. Press Enter key on keyboard
3.

Actual Results:  
Your search - http://chicago. indymedia. org/newswire/display/74806/index.php - did not match any documents. 

Expected Results:  
Either presented the Web page, or come up with an error message if the page could not be found.

Am using default theme

Comment 1

[Anders Conbere]

This is detecting that you aren't entering a valid url  (those spaces... not valid they would have to be urlencoded "%20") and then doing a google feeling lucky search for it.  Just like it would if you were to enter something like "cheese" this is by design.

Comment 2

[Bill Samuel]

The space got added, I guess through line breaking, in submission of the bug.  It didn't exist in the original case, and I have tried it again making sure there were no spaces and it does the same thing.

Maybe this bug is actually a feature, but it is one that defeats the way the Web is designed to operate.  An invalid URL should get the appropriate error message, not revert to a search which results in no information as to the type of error.  The Web is designed to use error messages with problem URLs, and not allowing it to work properly is very bad design, if not a bug because it was intended.

Firefox 2 has come in for heavy criticism, and I'm inclined to agree that on the whole 1.5 is better.  The problems will be noticed much more frequently than the improvements.

Comment 3

[Anders Conbere]

WFM Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0

So let me explain the process that happened here.  That's not a valid url string.  If you had entered a valid url string that failed... then Firefox would have either complained about not being able to connect, or would have displayed the appropriate error message handed to it by the web server.  But what you have down there isn't a valid url, thus the idea is that since Firefox has NO way of handling it, it should do a search because that's the most likely thing to return a result that the average user can use.

Not only that but when that url is fixed it loads just fine for me.

Marking as WFM / Invalid