420829 - Automatically select top item in drop-down

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 410837

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement)

Description

[Yehuda Katz]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9b4pre) Gecko/2008030304 Minefield/3.0b4pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9b4pre) Gecko/2008030304 Minefield/3.0b4pre

It would be a nice UX enhancement if the top item in the drop-down box was automatically selected. This would allow "cnn enter" instead of "cnn down-arrow enter".

Since the whole point of the new awesomebar is to bring the most likely item to the top of the list, this would provide a noticeably improved experience for common cases.

Oh, and the reason I noticed this was that Safari does it and I was annoyed by Firefox's lack of this feature when I started using FF more heavily with the FF3 beta series.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Type the beginning of a URL (e.g. dail)
2. Hit enter
Actual Results:  
The partial URL is attempted (dail)

Expected Results:  
The top item in the list is activated (dailykos.com)

Comment 2

[bomfog]

Bug 186136, as near as I can tell, is mostly about auto-completing when typing a url, and pref-UI therefore. That won't help when searching for tags, titles, etc., and/or when entering multiple terms, right? Also, doesn't auto-complete only work when the typing includes the beginning of the URL domain?

What I was hoping was that <enter> would go to whatever page is at the top of the drop-down at that point, whether due to auto-completing a URL, matching tags or title words or mid-URL chunk, or whatever. OP may disagree.

With mardak's adaptive awesomebar, the top result is usually what I want, but all too often I forget to tab or arrow down, and get a "feeling lucky" search on the tag or title word I typed in. Then I mutter quietly, stop the page load, and start over.

So, de-dupe-able?

Comment 3

[Yehuda Katz]

Michael's frustration clearly articulates my rationale for posting this bug. If he's correct that Bug 186136 doesn't fully cover the myriad new searches performed by the AwesomeBar, please dedup.

Comment 4

[Chris Forbes [:chrisjf]]

Note: the current default behaviour when you type a word and press enter is Firefox will do a Google I'm Feeling Lucky search. However, I now use the new AwesomeBar way more than I do Google I'm Feeling Lucky searches. I think when a user types a word and presses enter, Firefox should use the first result suggested by the AwesomeBar and Firefox should NOT do a Google I'm Feeling Lucky search.

Comment 5

[bomfog]

(In reply to comment #1)
> 
> *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 186136 ***
> 

commented there