360515 - Bring back autocompletion of form input field data in Firefox

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 60861

(Toolkit :: Form Manager, enhancement)

Description

[Don Erway]

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

Back when Firefox was phoenix, and even when it was firefox 0.9x, it had one huge advantage over Mozilla - smart & easy autocompletion of text input fields.  Even when form manager could not figure out the data input fields, just typing the first few letters or numbers of the item was enough to quickly narrow it down to a single entry, and dynamically autofill the rest of the entry.

Somewhere that went away, and is a HUGE loss.  The form manager is a fine idea, for pages that you go back to again and again, it works fine then.  Double clicking in fields that it knows how to fill is fine.

But for the zillion pages you go to only once, for the first time, you have manually type or cut & paste your address nearly every time.

This USED to be a big advantage of firefox over Mozilla.  Not sure exactly when it went away.

This is the same functionality we have in the URL address bar today, with "browser.urlbar.autoFill", set to true.

This happens to be the way IE does it, but that is really not the point.  It is just a huge time saver.  Consider my address:  9538 Really Long Random Name Rd.

With a proper autocompletion, I would only ever have to type the address once, period, and then all I would ever have to type is the "95" or however many characters are needed to uniquely select it out of all my saved data.

But with the existing form manager, if it cannot ID the field, I have to type the hole long address over and over.  This actually happened to me one day recently - where I had to enter my number-and-long-street-address, and long-city-name, and zip code about 8 times, on different sites, and had to manually type them each time!





Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. GO to a new web site that you've never been to before

2. Start entering your street address in an address data input field that firefox cannot figure out.

Actual Results:  
You have to enter the entire address, character by character.



Expected Results:  
It should offer drop down list of matching strings, and autofill the field for you, when it has been uniquely determined.

Same behaviour as the url address bar, when "browser.urlbar.autoFill", is set to true.

It should completely fill in the field, with 9538 Really Long Random Name Rd, after I type "95"





Is reporting this for firefox different than the existing report for the mozilla core?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60861

Could this be done as an extension, or is it too central, and too much in conflict with the form manager?

Comment 1

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

(In reply to comment #0)
> Is reporting this for firefox different than the existing report for the
> mozilla core?
> 
No, Core is also Firefox. What would be Firefox without Core :)
I would be very surprised if there were no extension for this function.


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 60861 ***

Comment 2

[Don Erway]

There is not any extension that does this right.