905791 - Awesome bar is too aggressive in classifying locations as URIs

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 700470

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Seth Fowler [:seth] [:s2h]]

When searching for programming-related things I frequently encounter problems with the awesome bar that I do not encounter in other browsers. Firefox is far too aggressive at classifying anything that looks vaguely URI-ish as a URI. As an example, searching for "document.open" produces these results in major browsers:

- Safari: Google search for "document.open"
- Chrome: Google search for "document.open"
- Firefox: Server not found

We should really fix this. There are multiple solutions here. Chrome's approach appears to be to have a whitelist of valid TLDs and send everything else to search; see https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=30636. This has caused some fury among developers and corporate users who make use of custom TLDs internally, causing them to switch from Chrome to Firefox (!!). We probably shouldn't break their use-case.

IMO the most reasonable approach is to try to load ambiguous locations as URIs first, and if DNS resolution fails fall back to treating the location as a search, but display an unobtrusive notification at the top of the search page along the lines of "Couldn't load document.open". This should support everyone's use-cases (albeit with a bit more latency when searching for ambiguous locations because of the additional DNS request).