469147 - Pressing Ctrl+Enter in the location bar munges valid URLs

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 358538

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Rick Alther]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 (CK-IBM) Firefox/3.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 (CK-IBM) Firefox/3.0.4

This bug is the more general case of bug 233853.  In that bug, someone fixed just the .com case without taking into account all the other TLDs that are out there.  This bug report is being opened for the general case.  Bug 469140 and 469143 were also opened as a result of bug 233853 being closed.

If I type 'acm.org' and Ctrl+Enter, it goes to the wrong address - it tries
'www.acm.org.com'.  In fact it munges any URL which does not have '.com' in its name.  e.g. if I enter 'smh.com.au' and press Ctrl+Enter, it goes to the site properly without munging it.  But if I go to 'bluewin.ch' and press Ctrl+Enter, it tries to go to 'www.bluewin.ch.com'.

IMO Ctrl+Enter should be struck dead or open the URL in another background tab.
 That way the UI is simpler and more consistent.  The user only needs to
remember that 'Ctrl+[click/enter]' opens a link in another tab.  It's much
easier to tell new people "just Ctrl+[click/enter] on any link to open a tab"
than to tell them to remember to use Alt for some and Ctrl for others,
depending on where you are.  That's just an inconsistent UI. I haven't checked
them all, but isn't Firefox the only browser to copy this IE 'feature'?  I
don't recall Opera, Konqueror or Safari doing this (but I don't have them avail
to test ATM). 

Another reason this feature is outdated are the numerous new TLDs out there
(e.g. .biz and .info) as well as the country TLDs.  Firefox is supposed to be
an international browser, yet this feature is inherently US centric.  Finally, many websites don't prepend 'www' to their sites anywmore (it's redundant these days).  This is truly an outdated feature from the old days of the web.

Ctrl+Enter should simply open a URL in a new tab, just like Ctrl+Click.  Consistent UI.

If it's decided that this feature should still live, it should take into
account keywords and tags as well.
1) first, it should just check to see if the location is a single word.  If
it's got a '.' in it, it shouldn't even be considered for 'fixing'.
2) Bookmarks should be searched for matching keywords/tags and use the
associated URL if it finds one.
3) Only then should Firefox attempt to 'fix' it.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Test #1
1. Enter a URL which does not end in .com (e.g. acm.org, nps.gov, neustarregistry.biz, australia.gov.au, wcsu.edu, etc.)
2. Press Ctrl+Enter
3. Notice the URL gets munged to 'www.entered-url.com' (e.g. www.acm.org.com)

Test #2
1. Enter a URL with .com in it but not at the end (e.g. smh.com.au)
2. Press Ctrl+Enter
3. It does NOT appear to munge any URL with '.com' somewhere in the name.  Clearly the 'fix' for 233853 is more of a hack than a real fix.

Actual Results:  
In Test #1, the URL gets munged with 'www' prepended and '.com' appended to the URL, even if the URL was valid.

Test #2 shows that the fix for 233853 isn't really a fix at all since the logic just looks for '.com' somewhere in the address and avoids munging if it finds it regardless of where it is in the URL.

Expected Results:  
Ctrl+Enter should not attempt to munge the URL at all.  There are too many TLDs which aren't .com which are valid.  This munging is inherently US centric for a global browser.  

As noted above, I think Ctrl+Enter should simply open the URL in a new tab to make the UI consistent:
* Ctrl+Click opens a link in a new tab.  Alt+Click DOES nothing.
* Ctrl+Enter opens a link in a new tab if the keyboard focus is on a link.  Alt+Enter does nothing.

Why then do we tell people that only on the Location bar we expect them to open new tabs using Alt+Enter?  Everywhere else in the UI is Ctrl+(enter/click).

Comment 1

[Rick Alther]

Correction: Alt+(click/enter) on links in the page does do something - it saves the data the ink pointed to.

Comment 2

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

I can see this with Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20081211 Minefield/3.2a1pre. Please try to keep this to one issue per bug though. I can't tell if you have one or two :).

Comment 3

[Rick Alther]

This is a single problem: Ctrl+Enter in the Location bar corrupts URLs.  

Later in the post I was explaining the inconsistency of the Ctrl+Enter/Alt+Enter issue.  As can be seen, I'd rather just get rid of this munging "feature" altogether.  That would fix several problems at once.  I guess that's my proposal for the solution rather than declaring it an outright bug.

Comment 4

[Kevin Brosnan]

This is a dupe of bug 358538