691078 - Spaces are not automatically inserted in awesome bar using Swype

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Patrick Walton (:pcwalton)]

Automatic space insertion using Swype is disabled when entering search queries in the Awesome Bar. This breaks my muscle memory; I'm not used to having to tap the spacebar after every keystroke.

Comment 1

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

The awesomebar puts the keyboard into "url" mode.  Different keyboards handle this differently; Swype chooses to disable spaces.  This makes it easier to enter URLs but harder to enter searches.

The awesomebar allows both URLs and searches; anything we do to improve one use case can hurt the other.  It also depends a lot on the keyboard.  In the stock Android keyboard, URL mode makes "/" and ".com" much easier to type, but doesn't hurt regular text entry much.  In Swype, URL mode makes regular text entry a pain but URLs are only slightly easier.

Since the combined search/URL fields in other Android browsers (including the default Browser app) have the same problem, I'm going to consider this not a Firefox bug, and leave it to Swype and other keyboard vendors to choose whether to change something here.