Re: Address bar searches (was: epiphany-list gnome org)

[Kristoffer Lundén <kristoffer lunden gmail com>]

On 9/6/05, Joseph S. Huang <josephshuang gmail com> wrote:
> A better way than disabling keyword search to fix #15848 would be to fix
> the keyword functionality, by sending strings which start with a
> protocol (such as http://) and don't resolve in DNS to an error page,
> instead of doing a search. That's what I figure from reading the liked
> Mozilla bug, anyways.
>

A problem with that is that many entered strings that are meant to be
URLs don't start with a protocol. You enter 'gnome.org' or
'localhost', not bothering with the protocol. The current workaround
for several browsers seems to be to identify everything with a dot
present as an URL, even when they are clearly not, as in normal
sentences with trailing space after the dot, or a string ending in a
dot. Even taking that into account, it means that me searching for
'document.pdf' fails because it look like an URL - and on some
internal companies LAN or in the future it might be a valid URL,
further complicating matters.

That's why I think it's intiutive to try DNS for everything that might
be valid and if there's no hit, try a search instead. If the site is
down, but exists in DNS, there is no search - the browser has already
moved on to trying a fetch. If that fails, error messages are
appropriate. If it doesn't exist in DNS, chances are that you meant a
search (or that you are mistaken about the URL, in which case a search
also might help). This goes for strings that *do* start with http://
as well.

If you do surf sites that, if misspelled or removed from DNS, are so
sensitive that it would be a real concern to have them forwarded to a
search engine, then by all means it should be possible to disable. I
don't want to deny anyone that right, I just don't see how that is
even remotely the common case.

-- 
Kristoffer Lundén
☎ 0704 48 98 77
✉ kristoffer lunden gmail com
ICQ: 618 289 83
http://www.gamemaker.nu/