401944 - Disable appending "www." and ".com" to partially formed URLs

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Davor Cubranic]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071008 Firefox/2.0.0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071008 Firefox/2.0.0.8

If I type in a single word without periods for a location URL (i.e., "foo", or even "http://foo"), and that location is not accessible (for example, because I'm not on the right intranet), I'd like to be able to just get the message that the page cannot be displayed. However, Firefox (wrongly, as far as I'm concerned) attempts to resolve the URL by appending ".com", "www.", etc. (This is after I disabled keyword searching.) As likely as not, this just ends up at some junk adhosting site. There should be an option to disable this kind of URL expansion entirely, the way IE does it if "do not search from address bar" preference is selected. Didn't this only use to be done on Ctrl-Enter?

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Enter "http://foo" (as long as host "foo" does not exist on your local network)


Actual Results:  
End up at "http://www.yeah.com/"

Expected Results:  
Get an error about non-existent host if URL expansion is disabled.

Comment 1

[Mardeg]

in about:config filter for browser.fixup.alternate.enabled
double-click that to change it to false

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

If Firefox would be adding "www." or ".com", then it would have been www.foo.com, not www.yeah.com (whihc you can get with ctrl-enter).

This is actually the Location Bar Search, which is done with the aid of Google's "Browse by Name" search (by default). See <http://kb.mozillazine.org/Location_Bar_search>.

Comment 3

[Davor Cubranic]

As I said in my submission, keyword searching was turned off. My guess is that www.foo.com is owned by the adhoster and redirected to www.yeah.com.

Thanks to comment 1! Disabling "fixup.alternate" did the trick. I tried all sorts of online searches for this functionality, but I did not try "domain guessing". Resolving invalid. (Although a UI for the pref would have been nice.)

Comment 4

[Stephen Donner [:stephend] Not actively reading bugmail]

Verified invalid