467976 - Autocompleted URL for keywords is misleading when no search term is entered

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 453120

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Attachment: Misleading URL

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b2) Gecko/20081201 Firefox/3.1b2 ID:20081201061100

Saved searches with a keyword set show a misleading URL in the autocomplete dropdown when no search term is given. Means the '%s' parameter is replaced by the keyword name. See the following steps for more details:

1. Create a fresh profile to better see this issue
2. Create a new bookmark by adding http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=%s as the location
3. Enter "bug" into the keyword field
4. Save the bookmark
5. Goto the location bar and enter "bug"
6. Wait until the drop down is shown and hit Enter

With step 5 the drop down is shown and will present 2 entries. The first one will be the newly created keyword and the second one the appropriate bookmark entry. As you can see (also in the attachment) both URLs differ:

keyword entry:  http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=bug
bookmark entry: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=%s

The keyword entry always replaces the place-holder with the keyword name if no search term is entered. Adding a number you will see that it is shown instead of 'bug'.

If you don't press the down or up arrow key and hit Enter while only "bug" is visible in the location bar, the following URL will be opened: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=

I believe that a lot of users will be distracted by this behavior. Why we add the keyword name as a replacement for '%s' if no term is given? Is this an intended behavior, Edward? I don't think so. We should really be consistent with the suggestion and the finally opened URL.