587352 - set keyword.url to "" for all locales

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

All locales that want to use the default behavior of searching using the default search engine's normal search need to have their keyword.url pref set to "". Right now this includes all locales where Google is the default, i.e. all but "ru".

Given that most locales just copy the en-US value, it'd be nice if we could automatically fall back to en-US if the string value just isn't present in the locale's region.properties. Can we rely on l10n-merge to always do that? If so, we could just mass-remove the string from region.properties in l10n-central, and perhaps change l10n tooling to highlight the presence of keyword.URL as a potential problem that needs review.

Pike: please advise on the best way forward?

Comment 1

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Just to be clear, this is required for bug 586821 to take effect outside of en-US.

Comment 2

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Why would this be a locale-dependent decision?

I'm leaning towards making keyword.URL a non-localizable empty pref.

Comment 3

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

Axel, what about "ru" in the scenario you suggested?

Comment 4

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

I don't see anything special about "ru", tbh. They're set up to use yandex for keyword.URL, which is the default search engine. At least that's what I'm reading out of bug 471561.

Comment 5

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

If I understand this request correctly, we need to set keyword.URL to yandex for "ru", so that even if the user changes the default engine in the search box (say, chooses wikipedia), a search from the location bar still returns yandex's results page.

Comment 6

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

The default search engine is static, and may be different from the selected search engine.

Not sure what the code does if you actually select to "remove" the default search engine.

Comment 7

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

The URL used for keyword search in "ru" has a different clid parameter than the one used in the search engine description. I was assuming that was intentional.

Comment 8

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

(In reply to comment #6)
> Not sure what the code does if you actually select to "remove" the default
> search engine.

Hmm, good catch. As it is now, there would be a change in behavior (we'd switch to using the first visible engine). I'll file a bug.

Comment 9

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Kev, can you help out on the search parameters for yandex in this context?

Comment 10

[Kev Needham [:kev]]

The clid for the keyword.URL searches is a unique ID, and is something we'd want to maintain. Gavin: any chance of adding a mozparam to the search plugin that would specify a param in the event the search comes from the location bar, or is that pushing complexity farther than it should go? There are other instances where the location bar searches have different attributes from the search plugin, as well, so it's something we should have an answer for.

k

Comment 11

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

(In reply to comment #10)
> Gavin: any chance of adding a mozparam to the search plugin
> that would specify a param in the event the search comes from the location bar,

Yeah, I thought of that. I'll look into it, since it looks like it'd save us a lot of trouble.

Comment 12

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

I filed bug 587691 about the default engine issue, and bug 587719 for making keyword.url non-localizable - marking this WONTFIX accordingly.