632566 - Clicking Magnifying glass icon in search box links to Google's homepage

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

Description

[Laura Forrest]

In Fx 4 Beta 11 clicking the magnifying glass within the search field - without having search content in the box - sends a user to the Google homepage (www.google.com) instead of the Firefox homepage (about:home).

Clicking sans search term may be an edge case but it seems like we'd want to route people to our version of the homepage instead of Google's default.

Comment 1

[Laura Forrest]

Attachment: Screenshot

Comment 2

[Stephen Donner [:stephend] Not actively reading bugmail]

Gavin, is this an intended departure from 3.6, where clicking on it takes the
user to the Firefox start page, rather than Google.com, as we do now, in
Minefield/betas?

Comment 3

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

I will check for the regression range.

Comment 4

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

So this is because of bug 624625.

Comment 5

[Frank Yan (:fryn)]

This was intended behavior for bug 624625 's patch, but about:home may be a better choice. Gavin, thoughts?

Comment 6

[Frank Yan (:fryn)]

changing: <SearchForm>http://www.google.com/</SearchForm>
to:       <SearchForm>about:home</SearchForm>
doesn't seem to do anything, even if I delete search.json and search.sqlite.

Comment 7

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Doesn't block, as it's an optimization. We'd want to do the same thing for the Yondex default search plugin as well.

I'm not sure, from a UX perspective, what I'd expect, here. I think that we pointed to Firefox Start because it was a Firefox branded part of the search engine's website. Now that we locally host that, I'm not sure it's the right thing to do, since the user is expecting to interact with the search engine.

Comment 8

[Kev Needham [:kev]]

My 0.02 is that the behaviour as-is is what's expected. The magnifying glass links to what's defined in the plugin-specific <SearchForm>, so that when you change the selected plugin in the search bar, where you're taken when you click on the magnifying glass changes, too. 

Per the MozSearch docs (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Creating_OpenSearch_plugins_for_Firefox), SearchForm is "the URL to go to to open up the search page at the site for which the plugin is designed to search. This provides a way for Firefox to let the user visit the web site directly."

Comment 9

[Frank Yan (:fryn)]

FWIW, I concur with :beltzner and :kev.

Also, the favicon of about:home does not match the favicon of the Google search plugin. ;)

Comment 10

[Frank Yan (:fryn)]

Any strong objections to me WONTFIXing this?

Comment 11

[Laura Forrest]

(In reply to comment #10)
> Any strong objections to me WONTFIXing this?

No, not if this change is the expected behavior, as it sounds like it is per :beltzner and :kev.