A strange Firefox address bar behavior | Hacker News Reader

A strange Firefox address bar behavior

hexatomium.github.io

12 pointssvenfaw12 comments

I disabled all magic in the address bar so if I type "foo" it tries to connect to "http://foo" or else returns an "Unable to Connect" error. I was surprised how many steps were required to accomplish this.

I'd love to read the details on what you did, and I'm pretty sure plenty of others here would, too.

Set keyword.enabled to false in about:config. I do this because if I want to search, I can just press Ctrl+K or click on the search bar. I use Ctrl+L or click on the location bar only when I want to navigate to a specific URL.

%67 is "g" encoded. In this example, it's goo_g_. Typing %hexcode for any letter of a site in your history/bookmarks at the appropriate position triggers the behavior.

edit: %22 is interesting. It triggers a JSON snippet.

yeah, but the string that pops up has the >> gogoogle.com part as a literal. If you hit return it'll search that string in the default search engine.

Similar things happen if you do goog%6c or g%6f (i.e. urlencode other chars in the string)

The address bar on Firefox for Android also exhibits bizarre behavior. Type in github and then go to the end and try to add a username after the slash. Horrible!

That's different... That's just the standard UX of their mobile autocomplete. It's the same on iOS (I type "f" and it autofills a URL - next letter I type is appended to the end of that URL, slash and all).

This is a problem with how it's interpretations the encoding of characters - they should be escaped by default and be able to be enabled with a flag if there's a valid use for them.

It's probably just a JS bug where the length of the urldecoded string is used as an index into the fully url-encoded string.

Nope, redirects me to:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=goo%2567+%3E%3E+gogoogle.com%2F&t=...

Note: must type, do not copy and paste

Copy and paste down arrow? On mobile.

maps.%67 >> mamaps.google.com/

Bizarre.

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