391175 - url bar autocomplete not finding matches due to encoding / decoding urls

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

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

url bar autocomplete not finding matches due to encoding / decoding urls

steps to reproduce:

1) in the url bar, enter:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aunofficial&hs=9DD&q=%C4%97&btnG=Search

in the url bar you will see:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aunofficial&hs=9DD&q=ė&btnG=Search

2) do a url bar autocomplete on q=%C4%97, you'll get a hit

actual results:

do a url bar autocomplete on q=ė, you won't get a hit

expected results:

do a url bar autocomplete on q=ė, I'll get a hit (like I do with q=%C4%97)

note, this debug depends on bug #389491 landing.

Comment 1

[Brett Wilson]

The queries for URLs in history could be stored unescaped and in Unicode, with the encoding stored alongside it. This way you will be able to do string matches on it in the database. When reading URLs out of the database, you will need to apply the encoding to get the correct nsIURI out.

However, this has scary implications for link coloring. You would have to do this same transformation for incoming URLs, which would add more time to this critical path.

Instead, you could try to find things that could be queries in the input and escape them as such. but then you don't necessarily know the encoding to use when doing that. You could use the encoding from the top URL in the previous suggestion, which would eliminate the weirdness associated with the description of this bug, but it seems that a complete solution might impossible using the current design.

Comment 2

[Nikitas Liogkas]

<shameless plug>
The Autocomplete Manager extension implements this fix.
</shameless plug>

Comment 3

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

This should be fixed by bug 407974.

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Bug 451915 - move Firefox/Places bugs to Firefox/Bookmarks and History. Remove all bugspam from this move by filtering for the string "places-to-b-and-h".

In Thunderbird 3.0b, you do that as follows:
Tools | Message Filters
Make sure the correct account is selected. Click "New"
Conditions: Body   contains   places-to-b-and-h
Change the action to "Delete Message".
Select "Manually Run" from the dropdown at the top.
Click OK.

Select the filter in the list, make sure "Inbox" is selected at the bottom, and click "Run Now". This should delete all the bugspam. You can then delete the filter.

Gerv