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On 2014-10-09T16:51:00+00:00 7-tim-1 wrote:

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:32.0) 
Gecko/20100101 Firefox/32.0
Build ID: 20140923175406

Steps to reproduce:

In the address bar search for anything that contains a period but no
spaces. This is fairly common when searching for API or programming
terms:

console.log
response.write
async.each
etc...


Actual results:

Firefox responds with Server not Found error.


Expected results:

Since the search contains no valid TLD, the expected result is to handle
the query as a search.

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/20

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On 2014-10-10T10:02:51+00:00 Gijskruitbosch+bugs wrote:

Gerv, do you know if we have some kind of builtin list of valid TLDs?

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/21

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On 2014-10-10T10:18:17+00:00 Dao+bmo wrote:

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #1)
> Gerv, do you know if we have some kind of builtin list of valid TLDs?

No, this is the job of the DNS, and an invalid TLD in one network may be
valid elsewhere.

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/22

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On 2014-10-10T10:30:43+00:00 Gijskruitbosch+bugs wrote:

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [:dao] from comment #2)
> (In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #1)
> > Gerv, do you know if we have some kind of builtin list of valid TLDs?
> 
> No, this is the job of the DNS, and an invalid TLD in one network may be
> valid elsewhere.

Sure, the question is whether you want identical behaviour for someone
typing:

www.somenonexistingdomain.com

and

array.each

both of which currently would return the same server not found error (in
some cases after considerable time).

I would argue that the behaviour should not be the same, in that the
former should try to resolve first and not bother doing a search (but
maybe provide UI on the error page to do a search) whereas the latter
should search first.

DNS doesn't allow you to distinguish these; a list of IANA-registered
TLDs would.

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/23

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On 2014-10-10T11:50:56+00:00 Gervase Markham wrote:

Chrome uses the Public Suffix List (http://www.publicsuffix.org/) to
distinguish search terms from domain names. However, the problem with
this is that it requires your copy of the PSL to be very up to date; if
it's not, some domains are unnavigable because the browser insists on
doing a search anyway.

I'd say we should do a DNS request, but then do a search after a short
timeout (shorter than normal), with an infobar which says "Were you
actually trying to reach the website foo.bar?".

Gerv

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/24

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On 2014-10-10T17:28:21+00:00 Jaws wrote:

(In reply to Gervase Markham [:gerv] from comment #4)
> Chrome uses the Public Suffix List (http://www.publicsuffix.org/) to
> distinguish search terms from domain names. However, the problem with this
> is that it requires your copy of the PSL to be very up to date; if it's not,
> some domains are unnavigable because the browser insists on doing a search
> anyway.
> 
> I'd say we should do a DNS request, but then do a search after a short
> timeout (shorter than normal), with an infobar which says "Were you actually
> trying to reach the website foo.bar?".

What would be the issue with us trying to keep Firefox as up-to-date
with the PSL as Chrome does?

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/25

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On 2014-10-10T17:34:59+00:00 Gervase Markham wrote:

AIUI, we have more of a trailing version problem than they do. Perhaps
going forward, that won't be so. But I'd want to be confident first.

This use is not what the PSL was designed for; using it that way has a
number of disadvantages. If we are seriously considering it, I'll write
them up so we can make a wise decision.

Gerv

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/26

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On 2014-10-10T17:51:33+00:00 Jaws wrote:

(In reply to Gervase Markham [:gerv] from comment #6)
> AIUI, we have more of a trailing version problem than they do. Perhaps going
> forward, that won't be so. But I'd want to be confident first.

Trailing Firefox version or trailing PSL version? Because even if Firefox gets 
out of date, it should still be able to download updated PSL lists, right? 
(Barring any schema changes to the PSL)
 
> This use is not what the PSL was designed for; using it that way has a
> number of disadvantages. If we are seriously considering it, I'll write them
> up so we can make a wise decision.

I think we should seriously consider using the PSL for this. It gets us
the best possible solution for the time being (things like example.mov
will still fail to do a search, but such is the bane of gTLDs).

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/27

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On 2014-10-16T11:19:22+00:00 Gervase Markham wrote:

(In reply to Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me) from comment #7)
> Trailing Firefox version or trailing PSL version?

I meant trailing Firefox version.

> Because even if Firefox
> gets out of date, it should still be able to download updated PSL lists,
> right? (Barring any schema changes to the PSL)

If we built an automated-update system for the PSL, yes. Which we
currently do not have.

> I think we should seriously consider using the PSL for this. It gets us the
> best possible solution for the time being (things like example.mov will
> still fail to do a search, but such is the bane of gTLDs).

I think the best possible solution is to identify ambiguous text (any
"foo.bar"), and do both search and DNS at the same time. We can then
prioritise one or the other (might be a different decision for different
"TLDs") but offer the other in an infobar. No need to use the PSL for
that.

Gerv

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/28

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On 2014-10-16T15:32:31+00:00 Gijskruitbosch+bugs wrote:

(In reply to Gervase Markham [:gerv] from comment #8)
> I think the best possible solution is to identify ambiguous text (any
> "foo.bar"), and do both search and DNS at the same time. We can then
> prioritise one or the other (might be a different decision for different
> "TLDs") but offer the other in an infobar. No need to use the PSL for that.

If Firefox starts sending all "foo.com" entries in the location bar to
their search provider, IMO that would probably be considered a serious
privacy issue. It'd also not be a great solution for mobile.

Both of these are reasons why it'd be useful to have an offline list
(PSL or otherwise).

I've not looked at the format for the PSL, but naively I would have
thought that building a decent update system shouldn't be that hard...

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/29

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On 2014-10-16T16:04:44+00:00 Gervase Markham wrote:

True. Doh.

I've been arguing for an update system for the PSL for some time; it
would be great if someone could build one. Note, though, that it gets
"compiled" for Firefox from the original text format.

Gerv

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/30

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On 2014-10-16T16:35:51+00:00 Jaws wrote:

So we can probably break this in to two bugs. One for getting the URI
fixup code to see if a public suffix is in use, and another bug to
implement updating the local copy of the PSL list.

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/31

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On 2014-10-16T18:36:46+00:00 Gijskruitbosch+bugs wrote:

(In reply to Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me) from comment #11)
> So we can probably break this in to two bugs. One for getting the URI fixup
> code to see if a public suffix is in use, and another bug to implement
> updating the local copy of the PSL list.

Split off the updating to bug 1083971, morphing this to implement the
actual search behaviour and twiddling some of the requisite flags.

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/32

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On 2014-10-16T22:32:00+00:00 Gijskruitbosch+bugs wrote:

Gavin, can we add this into the scratchpad for the upcoming iteration?

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/33

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On 2014-10-16T22:36:12+00:00 Gavin Sharp wrote:

Given the dependency on bug 1083971, I'm not sure that makes sense. If
we're going to tackle this and bug 1083971 at the same time we'll need
more space overall, and I don't think we have that much space in the
next few iterations.

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/34

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On 2014-10-16T23:32:18+00:00 Gijskruitbosch+bugs wrote:

(In reply to :Gavin Sharp [email: ga...@gavinsharp.com] from comment #14)
> Given the dependency on bug 1083971, I'm not sure that makes sense. If we're
> going to tackle this and bug 1083971 at the same time we'll need more space
> overall, and I don't think we have that much space in the next few
> iterations.

Do you think fixing bug 1083971 is a hard requirement here? I am not
convinced that is the case. We already use the list to make e.g. cookie
setting decisions and coloring in the location bar (highlighting the
domain), which IMO is "worse" than the failure case here (cookies don't
work and/or security issues vs. you get a search with infobar instead of
directly getting the website). Chrome does a 6-week cycle for these (cf.
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=323402 ) so as long
as we always uplift this stuff to beta, we should be fine here.

I think I'd prefer to fix this first and then take work on the auto-
update stuff (which probably needs a breakdown as it'll need server
infra work).

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/35

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On 2014-10-17T09:02:43+00:00 Gervase Markham wrote:

After comment 11, I was going to comment that the problem with breaking
this issue into two bugs is that someone will suggest we fix one and not
the other, leading to all the problems I've outlined above. (Because I
suspect that once this is done, the impetus to write the auto-update
mechanism will dissipate.) But I didn't even have time to predict that
before Gijs already suggested it in comment 15 :-)

The comparison with cookies is not apt, because the fallback behaviour
is different. For cookies, if the suffix is not in the PSL, it falls
back to treating it like .com - i.e. flat registrations below the TLD.
For most TLDs, and most new gTLDs, that's fine. So being a bit out of
date is not a disaster. Having said that, we do experience some problems
with out-of-dateness and an auto-update mechanism would be a great thing
even if we didn't use it for this use.

However, in this case, the fallback behaviour would make the site much
harder to reach (because you'd get search results instead), which is a
much more serious failure. We would get a lot of irritation from the
owners of domains under new gTLDs who expect their names to work. Chrome
already gets a reasonable amount of this flak.

We've also not considered the issue of internal names. "array.each"
could very well be a server on the intranet of Each Corporation. Are
they expected to click through the infobar every time they want to visit
an internal site?

The DNS should be the arbiter of what is and isn't a valid name.
Different networks have different answers; a static list will get this
wrong. Doing search results after a couple of seconds, or as a
clickthrough, would be a great usability enhancement. Doing them by
default would be a usability disenhancement.

Gerv

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/36

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On 2014-10-20T17:59:01+00:00 Gijskruitbosch+bugs wrote:

(In reply to Gervase Markham [:gerv] from comment #16)

Snipping the top part. I see your point. I'll suggest we pick up the
other bug first, then. Clearing gavin's needinfo here.

> We've also not considered the issue of internal names. "array.each" could
> very well be a server on the intranet of Each Corporation. Are they expected
> to click through the infobar every time they want to visit an internal site?

We should probably have a pref for additional domain names and default
it to include .local. Corporations use distributed installs and can use
that to add their own suffixes if required.

> The DNS should be the arbiter of what is and isn't a valid name. Different
> networks have different answers; a static list will get this wrong. Doing
> search results after a couple of seconds, or as a clickthrough, would be a
> great usability enhancement. Doing them by default would be a usability
> disenhancement.

Hm. So I only just realized we don't yet do what we used to do for
single-word lookups (no dot), which is to redirect to search if DNS
fails. That can be another separate bug, I guess.

I (wrongly) assumed that this is essentially the same case as what we
fixed for single words, which is to always do a search unless we've
whitelisted the host (in this case, the TLD).

The problem we fixed for single-word lookups is that they can be super
slow on some networks (order of many seconds instead of the milliseconds
as we (people emailed for this bug right now) are probably used to).
Mobile goes in this bucket as well.

The reason certain other browsers (...) /feel/ faster is in part stuff
like this. If you wait even 200ms before hitting the search engine
instead, it'll feel slower to the user.

Your suggestion that we should wait for "a couple of seconds" doesn't
fix the DNS issue unless we wait for DNS, which as said can be very slow
(more than 2s :-) ).

I would suggest that the main issue here wouldn't be enterprise users
(who are a minority anyway and could get their enterprise to set this up
in their configurations) or users who locally use particular domains
(who can use a similar whitelist as we have for non-dot-things-that-
resolve-in-DNS, and who I don't think will have so many intranet/local
domains that this will require more than 1-2 failure cases).

Instead, I think the flip side here is privacy (see also the discussion
in bug 1083634). I'm not sure if that is serious enough to make this a
clickthrough instead of automatic.

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/37

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On 2014-10-24T13:47:04+00:00 Gervase Markham wrote:

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #17)
> We should probably have a pref for additional domain names and default it to
> include .local. Corporations use distributed installs and can use that to
> add their own suffixes if required.

I'm sure there are plenty of small companies which don't use that kind
of system for rolling out software.

My point is: if you think you can decide what is a resolvable name
without consulting the DNS, you are going to have a bad time. Chrome
does this, and it's caused problems with new gTLDs, and other problems
too. As maintainer of the PSL people complain to me, and I have to shrug
and point them at specific bits of software.

An auto-update system helps with the gTLD problem, but it doesn't help
with the local names problem.

> Hm. So I only just realized we don't yet do what we used to do for
> single-word lookups (no dot), which is to redirect to search if DNS fails.
> That can be another separate bug, I guess.

Why not just do that, and use the same system for foo.bar?

> I (wrongly) assumed that this is essentially the same case as what we fixed
> for single words, which is to always do a search unless we've whitelisted
> the host (in this case, the TLD).

When did that change go in?

> The problem we fixed for single-word lookups is that they can be super slow
> on some networks (order of many seconds instead of the milliseconds as we
> (people emailed for this bug right now) are probably used to). Mobile goes
> in this bucket as well.

Well, fine; adopt a quicker timeout then pop up an infobar if the DNS
finally comes back with a non-NXDOMAIN answer.

> The reason certain other browsers (...) /feel/ faster is in part stuff like
> this. If you wait even 200ms before hitting the search engine instead, it'll
> feel slower to the user.

How do other browsers deal with the issues I've been outlining? Does
Chrome make people whitelist all their internal network names?

Chrome has more of a problem because they have an omnibox, whereas we
don't.

Gerv

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/38

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On 2014-10-24T14:09:09+00:00 Gijskruitbosch+bugs wrote:

(In reply to Gervase Markham [:gerv] from comment #18)
> (In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #17)
> > We should probably have a pref for additional domain names and default it to
> > include .local. Corporations use distributed installs and can use that to
> > add their own suffixes if required.
> 
> I'm sure there are plenty of small companies which don't use that kind of
> system for rolling out software.
> 
> My point is: if you think you can decide what is a resolvable name without
> consulting the DNS, you are going to have a bad time. Chrome does this, and
> it's caused problems with new gTLDs, and other problems too. As maintainer
> of the PSL people complain to me, and I have to shrug and point them at
> specific bits of software.
> 
> An auto-update system helps with the gTLD problem, but it doesn't help with
> the local names problem.

What's "the local names problem"?
 
> > Hm. So I only just realized we don't yet do what we used to do for
> > single-word lookups (no dot), which is to redirect to search if DNS fails.
> > That can be another separate bug, I guess.
> 
> Why not just do that, and use the same system for foo.bar?

Firstly, because as I said later on, that's not enough in terms of
providing a good UX.

Secondly, because I'm far more likely to mistype the domain than the
gTLD (mostly by function of them being longer), and the same privacy-
conscious people who complained about the change for single-word input
would be even more upset if typing e.g. "www.mozilllla.org" took them to
the search engine. [0]

[0] I was too lazy to look for a working example with a levenshtein
distance of 1 for more than 5 minutes; most things I tried were domain-
squatted

> > I (wrongly) assumed that this is essentially the same case as what we fixed
> > for single words, which is to always do a search unless we've whitelisted
> > the host (in this case, the TLD).
> 
> When did that change go in?

bug 693808, so Firefox 33

> > The problem we fixed for single-word lookups is that they can be super slow
> > on some networks (order of many seconds instead of the milliseconds as we
> > (people emailed for this bug right now) are probably used to). Mobile goes
> > in this bucket as well.
> 
> Well, fine; adopt a quicker timeout then pop up an infobar if the DNS
> finally comes back with a non-NXDOMAIN answer.

That's essentially what we do now, except our timeout is 0. Adding a
non-zero timeout here would take significant engineering effort. I would
say that the ROI of making the timeout 200ms is essentially 0 (because
it'll still be noticeably slow(er) than an immediate search even when
DNS is slower than 200ms), and the ROI of making it 1s or higher is just
negative.

> > The reason certain other browsers (...) /feel/ faster is in part stuff like
> > this. If you wait even 200ms before hitting the search engine instead, it'll
> > feel slower to the user.
> 
> How do other browsers deal with the issues I've been outlining? Does Chrome
> make people whitelist all their internal network names?

Yes. But "whitelist" sounds onerous. Both Chrome and us pop up an
infobar in this case (we still do the DNS lookup!), and if you click the
"yes, take me to myfancylocalserver" button, that automatically
whitelists that host.

> Chrome has more of a problem because they have an omnibox, whereas we
don't.

Maybe, but so do IE and Safari. We're the only popular browser I know
that still has a discrete search box, and people come with the habit and
expectation that searching from the location bar will also work - and it
mostly does, just badly in some cases. We should fix that.

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/39

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On 2014-10-24T14:23:47+00:00 Gervase Markham wrote:

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #19)
> What's "the local names problem"?

The fact that only my local DNS server knows whether "for.each" is a
resolvable name on my local network. No centralized list can tell the
browser this.

> > > Hm. So I only just realized we don't yet do what we used to do for
> > > single-word lookups (no dot), which is to redirect to search if DNS fails.
> > > That can be another separate bug, I guess.
> > 
> > Why not just do that, and use the same system for foo.bar?
> 
> Firstly, because as I said later on, that's not enough in terms of providing
> a good UX.

Well, it's worked OK for years :-)

> > When did that change go in?
> 
> bug 693808, so Firefox 33

Having read that entire bug, I don't see the part where the pros and
cons of making the change were weighed up, and a clear-eyed decision was
made that the breakage of doing this was worth the improvement. Where
did that happen?

If I can't talk you out of this, I think you should do the following:

* Have a whitelist of TLDs as well as one of hosts
* Add .local, .localhost to it by default, along with .corp, .home and .mail
  <http://blog.icann.org/2014/02/mitigating-dns-namespace-collisions/>
* If someone types foo.bar and says "I want to visit this site", whitelist the 
entirety of ".bar", not 
  just "foo.bar".

Gerv

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/40

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On 2014-10-26T21:07:25+00:00 Gijskruitbosch+bugs wrote:

*** Bug 992538 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/41

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2015-08-26T20:13:43+00:00 Gijskruitbosch+bugs wrote:

*** Bug 1198832 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/42

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On 2015-08-26T20:50:02+00:00 Arni2033 wrote:

An idea from bug 1198832:
> It was said in bug 1196906 that Shift key is used to bypass urlbar actions, 
> so it may be used
> here as well, to allow searching for domains even if they are known.

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/43

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On 2015-09-16T13:38:52+00:00 Gijskruitbosch+bugs wrote:

*** Bug 1017518 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/44

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2016-01-26T10:07:29+00:00 Gijskruitbosch+bugs wrote:

*** Bug 1242642 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/45

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2016-01-26T14:54:26+00:00 liquider wrote:

Tracking PSL updates being so bad an idea (cf. comment 16) must be the
reason why this issue hasn't seen update for more than a year.

With "Omnibar" behavior since Firefox 46 (or so), what is the reason,
again, for not doing simply:

1. a DNS query;
2. if the domain is unresolvable, if the user has "Visited this site prior to 
today", show the neterror;
3. else, do a search query with default search provider.

The additional, history-scrutinizing condition in step 2 is to alleviate
any privacy concerns. If the user visited that site before, it may
really be down now. But if the site is new, it may as well be a typo. In
any case, it being a typo or the user being a paranoid loony seems a
much less frequent use case compared to the whole of IT sector looking
up their reference!

Privacy-conscious individuals should and do use a custom, "safe" search
engine, such as a local instance of Searx, or similar.

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/46

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On 2016-01-26T15:02:43+00:00 Mak77 wrote:

(In reply to liquider from comment #26)
> what is the reason, again,
> for not doing simply:
> 
> 1. a DNS query;

The fact it can take seconds to get a reply, and in the meanwhile your browser 
just looks asleep.
Here there are 2 major points:
1. performance: we don't want the browser to look slow
2. privacy: we don't want to send domain-looking things to a search engine by 
default

The only viable solution proposed so far looks like the whitelist.
I think we might evaluate improving the notfound page contents to finally 
provide some useful options, for example in this case it could tell something 
like "Did you mean to search for 'for.each' instead?", and that could populate 
a whitelist.
The comment 20 whitelist solutions sounds good enough to me.

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/47

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On 2016-01-26T15:42:52+00:00 liquider wrote:

> 1. performance: we don't want the browser to look slow

If the query looks like a domain name (has dots, no space), the current
behavior (since always) is to make a DNS request, so I don't see how the
new behavior will negatively affect the perceived performance. Only
those users in environments with slow nameservers, entering domain-like,
non-resolvable queries AND with an actual search intent will be
affected. A minority, <1% use case.

> 2. privacy: we don't want to send domain-looking things to a search
engine by default

They are not sent by default. Only if they don't resolve. Don't privacy-
conscious people use trustworthy search engines anyway?

> "Did you mean to search for 'for.each' instead?"

Searching from the notfound page is exactly the opposite to comment 20.
The most important drawback being the need to confirm searching after
every unique query and then keeping multiple opposing lists. I think
comment 20 proposes adding the hostname (and its up-level domain(s))
onto the whitelist only if the user chooses the "Visit http://a.b/"; in
the dropdown list.

Can we agree on "Visit http://a.b/"; being the second entry in the
dropdown list (and thus a non-default choice, i.e. positioned after "a.b
- Search with _") until its DNS result proves positive??

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/48

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On 2016-01-26T15:57:05+00:00 Mak77 wrote:

(In reply to liquider from comment #28)
> If the query looks like a domain name (has dots, no space), the current
> behavior (since always) is to make a DNS request, so I don't see how the new
> behavior will negatively affect the perceived performance.

Currently you see it's slow, and then you get a notfound page and you connect 
the slowness to the fact it's invalid.
With the change you suggest, the only thing you'd see is that the browser took 
a lot of seconds just to load a search page. It is very different from a 
perception point of view.
Then you could argue typing something with a dot is a less common case than 
typing a single word, so it may not matter much, and here we could agree.

> > 2. privacy: we don't want to send domain-looking things to a search engine 
> > by default
> 
> They are not sent by default. Only if they don't resolve. Don't
> privacy-conscious people use trustworthy search engines anyway?

Privacy-conscious people want to know where their data goes before it
does. Provided a trustworthy good engine exists, it's still something to
evaluate with care since our mission.

> The most important drawback being the need to confirm searching after every
> unique query and then keeping multiple opposing lists. I think comment 20
> proposes adding the hostname (and its up-level domain(s)) onto the whitelist
> only if the user chooses the "Visit http://a.b/"; in the dropdown list.

You can't choose the visit in the dropdown list, that's just what happens when 
the input field text is confirmed. Selecting that entry or pressing Enter in 
the input field is the same exact thing.
So no, that wouldn't work. Afaict the final part of comment 20 is about a 
general whitelist approach with something that allows to add stuff to it.
I just suggested the notfound page itself could be that thing.

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/49

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2016-01-26T16:08:52+00:00 liquider wrote:

> You can't choose the visit in the dropdown list

What do you mean, of course I can choose an entry from the drop-down?
The reason the browser upon Enter navigates to that page is that the
"Visit ..." is the first and only entry in it. Were there several
entries, the user would be able to choose the action to take (as they
are now with a regular search or history-matching query) by clicking or
with a Down arrow key.

In this light, "Visit ..." could be a non-default entry (i.e. after "...
- Search") when the site is not in user's history and until the DNS
resolves?

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/50

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2016-01-26T16:13:17+00:00 Mak77 wrote:

No, that Visit entry is special, it just shows in the UI what happens
when you confirm with Enter the location bar contents. So if enter is
going to do a search it will read "Search".

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/51

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2016-01-26T16:19:32+00:00 liquider wrote:

So there could be TWO entries deciding what Enter is going to do, one
that says "Search" and one that says "Visit"??

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/52

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2016-01-26T16:21:21+00:00 Mak77 wrote:

sure, but the problem then would be "what is the default?".

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/53

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2016-01-26T16:39:22+00:00 liquider wrote:

Even if "Visit" remains the default, with two entries, "Search" is most
easily available.

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/54

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2016-02-26T08:46:04+00:00 Mak77 wrote:

*** Bug 1251296 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/55

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2016-06-27T19:59:01+00:00 Matias Marchetti wrote:

Any chance to get this fixed...it's very annoying and it don't happend
on Chrome or Opera.

Maeby an option to enable this behaivor
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1080682#c26 would be a
great idea...big part of the users are not worried about privacy on
doing a domain search and it can be disable by default.

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/56

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2016-07-04T15:53:14+00:00 Gijskruitbosch+bugs wrote:

*** Bug 1284045 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/57

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2016-08-22T07:37:34+00:00 6-evan wrote:

Hi all,

Or could we try do fix the issue in a test pilot add-on universal-
search[1]? I'm asking that will universal-search be a system add-on in
Firefox in a GitHub issue[2]. If so, we might add the Public Suffix
List(or any other ways) to detect a string is a URL or just a keyword,
then do the right reaction.

Let's make thing happen, just like Matias said in Comment 36.

Any thought?

[1]: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/universal-search
[2]: https://github.com/mozilla/universal-search/issues/302

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/58

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2016-08-22T08:37:04+00:00 Gijskruitbosch+bugs wrote:

(In reply to Evan Tseng [:evanxd][:愛聞插低] from comment #38)
> Hi all,
> 
> Or could we try do fix the issue in a test pilot add-on universal-search[1]?
> I'm asking that will universal-search be a system add-on in Firefox in a
> GitHub issue[2]. If so, we might add the Public Suffix List(or any other
> ways) to detect a string is a URL or just a keyword, then do the right
> reaction.
> 
> Let's make thing happen, just like Matias said in Comment 36.
> 
> Any thought?
> 
> [1]: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/universal-search
> [2]: https://github.com/mozilla/universal-search/issues/302

I very much doubt that any of the test pilot add-ons will be included as
a system add-on anytime soon. In any case, it's not clear why exactly
the same concerns that have been raised in this bug would not apply just
because we'd implement the solution in a different bit of software. It
just moves the problem.

We should focus on a fix in the existing implementation. The URL bar
behaviour part of it is fairly straightforward - we'd just need to add
some more code in nsDefaultURIFixup.cpp . It's getting data out of the
PSL and making sure it is up-to-date that is more work, though by now we
have kinto, and maybe that can help. In any case, that division of work
wouldn't really change just by implementing it in the universal-search
add-on.

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/59

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2016-08-23T03:30:59+00:00 timdream wrote:

Assuming there are no objection from UX perspective, we should fix bug
1256074 first, which does not take PSL in-scope.

The bug here represents a feature involve PSL, and we have dependency
already set (bug 1083971).

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/60

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2016-10-11T13:12:21+00:00 Gijskruitbosch+bugs wrote:

*** Bug 1287302 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/61

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2017-01-12T10:45:59+00:00 Mak77 wrote:

*** Bug 1330459 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/62

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2017-04-26T15:27:23+00:00 Aryeh Gregor wrote:

Just pointing this out because I don't think I saw it in the discussion
so far: if the TLD list is incomplete, it only makes it hard to access
the site if you're typing the site into the URL bar by hand without a
protocol.  Entry into the URL bar with the protocol (e.g., copy-pasting
a URL) will still work.

Furthermore, if you've visited the site before, autocomplete will still
make the first result what you want.  E.g., if your company's internal
site is "company.internal", the first time you type it it might give you
a search page by accident.  But if it's in your history, especially if
you type it often, as soon as you start to type "comp" it should
autocomplete to "http://company.internal"; and work fine.

So I don't think this is a big deal if it does misidentify new or
private TLDs, or am I missing something?

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/63

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2017-10-27T15:29:52+00:00 Mak77 wrote:

*** Bug 1411051 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/64

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2017-11-01T12:57:54+00:00 Mhoye-4 wrote:

There's a note here about sending domain names to a search engine, but I
don't see any reference here to the opposite - the fact that by doing
the wrong thing we're accidentally sending a bunch of our search terms
to our DNS provider. Certainly in the case where we've selected, say,
DuckDuckGo as a search provider to avoid that sort of leakage, this is
bad.

If we had a way to set a pref that added something to PSL for internal
networks, would that get us where we need to go?

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/65

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2017-11-02T18:33:33+00:00 Gijskruitbosch+bugs wrote:

(In reply to Mike Hoye [:mhoye] from comment #45)
> There's a note here about sending domain names to a search engine, but I
> don't see any reference here to the opposite - the fact that by doing the
> wrong thing we're accidentally sending a bunch of our search terms to our
> DNS provider. Certainly in the case where we've selected, say, DuckDuckGo as
> a search provider to avoid that sort of leakage, this is bad.

Sure, but this bug would only really avoid this for search terms that
included a pseudo-domain, so it'd continue to exist for single-word
queries. Could you file an orthogonal bug? Perhaps we should provide an
opt-out pref, or do something cleverer (unsure what that would be, off-
hand).

> If we had a way to set a pref that added something to PSL for internal
> networks, would that get us where we need to go?

We already have this for the non-domain case, it wouldn't be hard to do
it for the internal network case, at least in terms of not showing the
notification bar / doing DNS lookups.

Note that making the actual PSL pref-extensible is scary to me because
of issues like bug 1365892. Randomly changing the PSL at runtime from
about:config would make a lot of stuff "fun" (like, hi, I can now break
setting cookies / using indexeddb / whatever on "foo.com" by adding it
to the PSL, which will maybe help my privacy/security but also maybe
break random other bits of the internet in ways I don't fully
understand). We know people mess with about:config in ways that
basically destroy their experience or make their browser insecure, and
users (somewhat) understandably blame us for making that possible.
I'm... not keen to open the PSL up to that type of thing.

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/66

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2017-11-02T18:34:20+00:00 Gijskruitbosch+bugs wrote:

(In reply to :Gijs (no reviews; PTO recovery mode) from comment #46)
> (In reply to Mike Hoye [:mhoye] from comment #45)
> > There's a note here about sending domain names to a search engine, but I
> > don't see any reference here to the opposite - the fact that by doing the
> > wrong thing we're accidentally sending a bunch of our search terms to our
> > DNS provider. Certainly in the case where we've selected, say, DuckDuckGo as
> > a search provider to avoid that sort of leakage, this is bad.
> 
> Sure, but this bug

Err, *fixing* this bug, of course.

> would only really avoid this for search terms that
> included a pseudo-domain, so it'd continue to exist for single-word queries.
> Could you file an orthogonal bug? Perhaps we should provide an opt-out pref,
> or do something cleverer (unsure what that would be, off-hand).

+ni for this

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/67

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2017-11-02T19:18:58+00:00 Mhoye-4 wrote:

I'm sorry, but I don't think I understand the single-word queries
problem.

As I understand the situation right now:
- Multi-word entries containing what could be a domain name automatically go to 
search. ("file.jpg test", "test file.jpg")
- Single-word entries that don't look like domains go to search, 
- Single-word entries that are correct domain names go to DNS and,
- Single-word queries that look like domains but aren't go to DNS. ("file.jpg")

I _think_ that the only thing we're getting wrong there is the last one,
and that a PSL lookup in that case only that sends null hits to search
would resolve it. I did file
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1411051 but it was duped
back to this one.

In the case of users requiring intranet namespaces to work, I honestly
don't think setting a pref in about:config is that big a burden.
Certainly that's almost invariably going to happen on corporate networks
with preconfigured images. For our typical users a refresh gets you out
from under that if you break something, and if you're going to cause
breakage in Firefox by doing random crap in about:config that you don't
understand it's not as though you're short of options.

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/68

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2017-11-02T23:31:39+00:00 Gijskruitbosch+bugs wrote:

(In reply to Mike Hoye [:mhoye] from comment #48)
> I'm sorry, but I don't think I understand the single-word queries problem.

> - Single-word entries that don't look like domains go to search,

They do. But we *also* look up the domain name. Try adding "foobar" as
an alias for localhost in your /etc/hosts file (or Windows equivalent),
then type 'foobar' in the URL bar and hit enter. Now you get a search
page for "foobar" but also a notification bar that says "Did you mean to
go to foobar?", so that it's easy to access such domains if that's the
behaviour you wanted.

Of course, in order to provide this functionality, we need to do a DNS
lookup. :-)


(In reply to Mike Hoye [:mhoye] from comment #48)
> In the case of users requiring intranet namespaces to work, I honestly don't
> think setting a pref in about:config is that big a burden.

It's not, I just wanted to clarify that I don't want that pref to
actually affect the 'real' public suffix list that we use to make
internal decisions like cookie and other data's scope, and same origin
policy... We can have a pref for what things are intranet suffixes, we
already have one for single-word local hosts (which is what that
notification bar saves "foobar" to if you say "ah yes, I did mean to go
to http://foobar/ instead of searching for 'foobar' ").

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/69

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2017-11-16T16:54:58+00:00 Mak77 wrote:

*** Bug 1417164 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/70

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2017-11-16T16:57:12+00:00 Mak77 wrote:

*** Bug 1417691 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/71

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2018-01-25T10:31:09+00:00 Mak77 wrote:

*** Bug 1432876 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/72

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2018-02-22T17:48:45+00:00 Mak77 wrote:

*** Bug 1085377 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/73

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2018-05-24T03:25:57+00:00 Gingerbread-man-2 wrote:

*** Bug 1463876 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/74

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2018-06-05T16:36:37+00:00 Mak77 wrote:

*** Bug 485588 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/75

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2018-08-07T07:57:41+00:00 Mak77 wrote:

*** Bug 1481341 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/77

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2018-08-13T15:11:48+00:00 Gingerbread-man-2 wrote:

*** Bug 1482838 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/78

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2018-10-05T11:20:20+00:00 Denis Howe wrote:

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [::mak] from comment #33)
> sure, but the problem then would be "what is the default?".

Current behaviour (FF Dev Ed 63): as soon as the thing in the address
bar looks like it might be a domain name (whether or not it's in DNS),
an "http://array.map/ - Visit" option is added below.  The problem is
that it's added as the first, default, behaviour, used if you hit Enter,
with search as the second option.

Please can search be the default behaviour.

If the string can be quickly determined to be an actual domain (from
DNS, history or TLD whitelist) the current behaviour might be acceptable
but just blindly assuming that anything with a dot in is a domain name
is unhelpful.

Reply at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/263505/comments/79


** Bug watch added: code.google.com/p/chromium/issues #323402
   http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=323402

** Bug watch added: github.com/mozilla/universal-search/issues #302
   https://github.com/mozilla/universal-search/issues/302

** Bug watch added: Mozilla Bugzilla #1411051
   https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1411051

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop
Packages, which is subscribed to firefox in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/263505

Title:
  Wishlist: add "use input as a search term" to "address not found" page

Status in Mozilla Firefox:
  Confirmed
Status in firefox package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: firefox

  Altogether too often when I get the "Address Not Found" page, it is
  because I expected too much from the Wonderful Bar or whatever it's
  called.  It would be a useful addition if the "Address Not Found" page
  could offer the option to use the stuff you typed into the location
  bar as input for your designated search engine, and/or perform history
  search on those terms.  (For me, the former is the more useful, but I
  expect both would be handy, and the effort to offer both is probably
  marginal if you decide to do one or the other.)

  All to often, what you typed in is no longer visible in the location
  bar, because http:// gets prepended and sometimes a .com appended to
  what is displayed in the location bar at the point you get the
  "Address Not Found" error.

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