416144 - Spaces in the Location bar are not encoded

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Fedge]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b4pre) Gecko/2008020704 Minefield/3.0b4pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b4pre) Gecko/2008020704 Minefield/3.0b4pre

When visiting locations with %20 in the URL, such as http://s207.photobucket.com/albums/bb6/dutchalone/new%20folder the Location bar converts "%20"s to spaces and displays an "unsafe" URL.

From RFC 1738:

"The space character is unsafe because significant spaces may disappear and insignificant spaces may be introduced when URLs are transcribed or typeset or subjected to the treatment of word-processing programs."

My personal gripe with this is to do with copying and pasting URLs into forums and instant messenger programs which parse links to make them clickable; they view the space character as the end of the URL, resulting in broken links.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Visit http://s207.photobucket.com/albums/bb6/dutchalone/new%20folder
2. Copy contents of Location bar
3. Paste into your IM program of choice to send it off to one of your buddies
Actual Results:  
Manually escaping characters to share URLs

Expected Results:  
It should Just Work

Bookmarks are doing the "right" thing when they shouldn't be, all my bookmarklets are full of %20s. I'll file a separate bug for that, but it just looks like the escaping is happening in the wrong part of the program altogether.

I marked this as Major because URL handling is a big part of a browser's job, and Joe six-pack is not going to be manually urlencoding his stuff when he's in the forums or MSN.

Comment 1

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to comment #0)
> Steps to Reproduce:
> 1. Visit http://s207.photobucket.com/albums/bb6/dutchalone/new%20folder
> 2. Copy contents of Location bar
> 3. Paste into your IM program of choice to send it off to one of your buddies
> Actual Results:  
> Manually escaping characters to share URLs
> 
> Expected Results:  
> It should Just Work

Works for me. Copying the address from the Location bar gives me:
http://s207.photobucket.com/albums/bb6/dutchalone/new%20folder/?action=guestlogin

Comment 2

[Fedge]

(In reply to comment #1)

Yes it actually does copy something else than what it shows. I have been manually rewriting them to copy them ever since I got these upgrades happening, since they are looking quite wrong in the address bar. I'm changing this to minor because the actual functionality is not broken. What it's showing is still wrong in my opinion though but then again, I'm just some guy :P

Comment 3

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Comfirming, although that doesn't mean that I agree that we should display spaces encoded.

Comment 4

[Nate Smith]

I vote this is a bug that changes the behavior of normal interaction.  If you use windows, I guess you'd never notice;  any client in the X environment, however, may well expect that they can still just highlight (or ctrl-l) and then paste, without selecting "copy" or hitting ctrl-c first.  This is how I found the problem and then looked it up here.  

Incidentally, the space (or other un-urlencoded chars) is handled correctly within an href link;  I guess I just wonder why the behavior changed?  I definitely never saw this prior to FFb3.

Obligitory example:

http://i196.photobucket.com/albums/aa197/abfab26/handy%20abled/defaultaspx.jpg

Comment 5

[Jonathan S Abrams]

Is this related to bug #440075?

Comment 7

[crisp]

I vote for this bug since in my opinion not visually encoding spaces in the location bar gives the wrong impression that such URL's are actually valid (which they are not, luckily browsers correct such errors in most cases*)

* I just had to file https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=473822 since square brackets are not 'corrected' anymore

Comment 8

[Fedge]

The worst part of this seems to be the way bookmarklets are handled now. I'm pretty sure the change was all made at the same time/peice of code. All my bookmarklets are full of %20s.

Comment 9

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

No, that's bug 449994.

Comment 10

[BMO Automation]

Per policy at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bug_Triage/Projects/Bug_Handling/Bug_Husbandry#Inactive_Bugs. If this bug is not an enhancement request or a bug not present in a supported release of Firefox, then it may be reopened.