700474 - Make single-word searches faster using background unqualified hostname lookup

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 693808

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Frank Yan (:fryn)]

Attachment: proof-of-concept all-front-end patch

This is related to bug 700470, which is a wholly back-end fix.

Currently, Firefox's awesomebar isn't so awesome at handling a bunch of different kinds of inputs that are almost certainly intended to be search queries.

Example input: bacon
Expected outcome: searches for bacon while performing background host lookup for bacon
Actual outcome: first performs host look up for bacon, which (almost always) fails, falling back to a search for bacon
On some ISPs/networks, doing the DNS lookup first can take several seconds, making us much slower than other browsers for the common case. :(

Fixing this requires both changing nsIURIFixup to determine inputs to be search queries more aggressively and for it to provide something that front-end code can listen to in order to generate a notification upon successful host lookup for those unqualified hostnames. I'm not sure what the front-end/back-end split will be exactly, but I'll put this down as Firefox: Location Bar for now.

Gavin, how would we architect this, so that other front-ends built on Gecko will also still be able to use unqualified hostnames when the lookup is moved to the background?

Comment 1

[Frank Yan (:fryn)]

This is actually a Snappy bug. Inheriting priority from bug 700470.
I'm unassigning myself, because a front-end fix for this has been deemed unacceptable, so invasively modifying nsIURIFixup would be required.

Comment 2

[dhakalp]

This bug alone has swayed many Firefox users to switch. I want to like Firefox. Help me out.