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

[Ryan Thiessen <ryanthiessen gmail com>]

On 9/5/05, Kristoffer Lundén <kristoffer lunden gmail com> wrote:

> 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.

I completely agree with this assessment.  It would be both simple and
inuitive for new and inexperience users, and powerful for those of us
who are experts.  Right now this can be enabled/disabled with the
about:config "keyword.enabled" toggle, so if users have special
privacy concerns they can toggle that, and maybe even a "Disable
automatic address bar searching" under Privacy for the future.

Is there still time to revert this in time for the gnome 2.12 release?
 It seems to me that no one is even arguing on behalf of the position
that the current behaviour should be kept.  Seems to be a very strong
consensus on this, but the 1.8 release was already made, and the Gnome
freeze starts today to the 7 Sep 2005.
http://live.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning/TwoPointEleven  I would hate to
see this major regression make it into distributions.

Cheers,
-Ryan Thiessen-