752413 - FF12 only matching root URLs in inline autofill

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[thenewrefugio]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.2; WOW64; rv:11.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/11.0
Build ID: 20120312181643

Steps to reproduce:

1. Enable browser.urlbar.autofill
2. Vist any URL with a trailing path behind the root domain: http://edition.cnn.com/EUROPE/
3. Clear urlbar and start typing the same URL: edition



Actual results:

Autofill fills: edition.cnn.com/


Expected results:

Autofill should fill: edition.cnn.com/EUROPE/

Because you never visited the root URL, it should not autofill it. You only visited the /EUROPE/ page, so that's what it should suggest.

I know the autofill behavior of FF has been discussed over and over in the past. But as the above example shows, it's not working correctly right now: If I never visit the root domain, but always a subpage, I don't want autofill to suggest the root.

I estimate >66% of the pages I visit regularly are sub-pages. Right now, the autofill feature has become useless for me in those cases. I therefore kindly ask the developers to please provide an about:config option to revert the autofill behavior to FF11 behavior.

Comment 1

[augustus.kling]

This is in my opinion a valid and important request since the proposal of domain names over the previously visited URLs gives a lot of false suggestions in practice.
Any chance to give bookmarked/starred URLs precedence over the domain name?

Probably this bug should be marked as blocking bug 566489 but this Bugzilla instance seems not to permit editing of the blocks field.

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

autoFill has been designed to help users navigating to most common typed domains, especially for non-technical users, so it's working as expected. you may keep completing by moving at the end of the domain.

At the moment I think what you want for your needs is rather disable autoFill and install the EnterSelects add-on. We'll evaluate the feedback, though ux team desighed current interaction with good use-cases in mind.

Comment 3

[thenewrefugio]

Thank you for the suggestion. However, I do not use the awesomebar - I use the oldbar addon. For the classical style address bar, the previous autofill behavior is essential.

It hadn't crossed my mind that the new autofill was of course designed with the awesomebar in mind. But for users of the classical addressbar, it would be very helpful if the new behavior could be switched off.

Comment 4

[gerben]

I'd like to add that the autofill option also prefers naked domains. 

E.g. I go a lot to the blog page of makezine; blog.makezine.com . Typing "blog" would give a lot of options, so instead I start typing "make".
Autofill now suggests makezine.com (which I've never visited). In older Firefox versions this would work just fine, but now I have to press arrow-down enter, instead of just enter. 

Pretty though unlearning a habit I had for a very long time. It's still annoying enough to create a account here and post this message.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

The feedback reports users are happy with the behavior we took, there will clearly be some broken cases that were supported in the past but are no more supported, but we can't provide both at the same time.
So, we will keep autofilling to the nearest slash (you can type blog, press right, type e, and you'll end up to blog.something.com/europe) unless we find there's compelling requests for the old behavior by majority of users.

Comment 7

[Nerijus Baliūnas]

Chrome does it (see bug 1087547), and IMHO it is much more convenient.

Comment 8

[M]

Would you reconsider adding this as an option, or point us to an add-on that provides this functionality.

Personally it's hard to believe but this has now become the biggest friction that makes me want to go back to Chrome.

There are lots of common websites where the front page is useless, for example Google Drive, where even the login button is well hidden.

I want to get to the full URL if I never visit the front page.

I'm not alone with this, especially with the influx of users switching from Chrome.

Comment 9

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

We're evaluating this in bug 1597791, which I guess is just a newer dupe of this bug. (Please don't add "me too" comments to that bug.)