576405 - Location bar should be aware of HTTP 301s and other redirects

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Justin Lebar (not reading bugmail)]

When I type in "bugzilla" into my location bar, the top hit is

    301 Moved Permanently
    http://bugzilla.mozilla.org

because bugzilla automatically redirects to https.

Since the location bar presumably knows where I'll be redirected, perhaps this interface could be improved.  For starters, we could pull the title off the redirect target instead of using "301 Moved Permanently".

Alternatively, maybe we could just show and highlight the entry for the redirect target.

Comment 1

[Brian Smith (:briansmith, :bsmith, use NEEDINFO?)]

Use cases:

1. I always type "gmail" into the awesomebar. The awesomebar always completss this to gmail.com. I always hit enter to accept the suggestion and I always get redirected to https://mail.google.com. Instead, Firefox should learn that the top suggestion should be https://mail.google.com. This is important for performance.

2. Same with google.com, which redirects to https://www.google.com.

3. Any site which is either HSTS or SPDY-enabled via Alternate-Protocol will have similar issues through various *internal* redirects within Necko.

It is possible to handle this in the HTTP layer by caching redirects (which we do), but the best performance will come from having the awesomebar directly send the user to the target URL. This is true even in the case of internal redirects that happen wholly within Necko, because multiple trips through the event loop and nsIContentPolicy and other filters are taken. If/when we implement more predictive fetching logic (DNS and whatnot), the redirect issue will likely limit the effectiveness of those optimizations.

This seems like a potentially big and user-notable performance win for not much cost. I think it would be great if the UI team and the network team could work out a plan for this and other similar optimizations.

Comment 2

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

This is being fixed by bug 737836.

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Partially fixed, but I'm leaving this open to eventually collect ideas for further improvements.

Comment 4

[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.