760836 - Domain Guessing stopped working

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 593709

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Will Budreau]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0
Build ID: 20120420145725

Steps to reproduce:

Typed "yahoo" into location bar and pressed enter


Actual results:

Took me to google search for Yahoo
https://www.google.com/search?q=yahoo&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=fflb
Then needed to click again to get to domain


Expected results:

Opened www.yahoo.com

Comment 1

[Will Budreau]

Background:
A friend who just upgraded to FireFox 12 reported he could no longer do this.  The only workaround I found was to set keyword.enabled to false, which now means the awesome bar is a lot less awesome. (He can live without keyword search.. I can't)

Comment 3

[Alice0775 White]

Sorry spam

Comment 4

[Dave Garrett]

Firefox used to use Google's browse-by-name service that did this, but its results were sometimes confusing or inconsistent for some people so it was disabled in favor of a plain Google search. I'm not really a fan of the change either, so I use this simple addon to get the feature back:
https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/browse-by-name/

Comment 5

[Philip Chee]

Will, you can try entering:
http://yahoo and then pressing enter. This should still work.

Comment 6

[Will Budreau]

@philip - my non-technical friend does not find typing "http://" easier than adding "www." and ".com" ;)
@Dave That analysis (and workaround) works for me and I've passed it on to the friend.

Comment 7

[Timvde]

You don't need an add-on for this. A simple switch of the keyword.URL value will do: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keyword.URL#Possible_values_and_their_effects

However, when this change was made, I wasn't involved in anything Mozilla related. I am now, so I would like to try and get this to be re-enabled :)

I know the rationale behind the chance was "Sometimes it goes directly to a page, at other moments it will do a Google search. This is inconsistent behaviour". Personally, I think that doing a Google search at all would be inconsistent behaviour of the location bar. It is used to go to sites immediately by providing a location, which is what BBN provides. It's obvious it can't find a matching site all the time, so the Google search is a good fallback. People *do* get this. The search bar is meant for searching, the location bar is meant for browsing to a site. BBN speeds up this process.

But I guess I will lose this discussion, as the UX team wants to remove the search bar entirely from the default set-up...