QA/Places/Unified autocomplete
Feature Ownership & Status
Ownership
Dev Lead: Marco Bonardo
QA Lead: Andrei Vaida, :avaida on IRC
Release target: Firefox 36
Status
[LANDED] Nightly 34: first landed on
[DISABLED] Aurora 34: release target moved to Firefox 35
[DISABLED] Aurora 35: release target moved to Firefox 36
[ON TRACK] Aurora 43: signed-off
[ON TRACK] Beta 43: signed-off
[ON TRACK] RC 43: landed
Summary
Context
The awesomebar in Firefox Desktop has been so far driven by two autocomplete searches implemented by the Places component:
- history: managing switch-to-tab, adaptive and browsing history, bookmarks, keywords and tags
- urlinline: managing autoFill results
Some of the possible improvements suggested for the awesomebar's content include:
- Better identify searches among the results
- Allow the user to easily find favorite search engine
- Always show the action performed by Enter/Go
- Separate searches from history
- Improve the styling to make each part more distinguishable
The decision to merge the existing components into a single new component called UnifiedComplete (toolkit/components/places/UnifiedComplete.js) was made because of the various architecture complications that would result from actually applying these improvements to the awesomebar.
Here are a few of the improvements currently available in Nightly 34's awesomebar:
- The autoFill result will now always cope with the first popup entry. Though note the behavior didn't change, we will still autoFill up to the first '/'. * This means a new popup entry is inserted as the top match.
- All initialization is now asynchronous, so the UI should not lag anymore at the first awesomebar search
- The searches are serialized differently, responsiveness timing may differ, usually improve
- Installed search engines will be suggested along with other matches to improve their discoverability
Note: See Marco Bonardo's blog post on Unified Autocomplete here.
Enabling the component
The UnifiedComplete component can be enabled by setting the following boolean pref to true:
browser.urlbar.unifiedcomplete
Note: this pref is true by default starting with Firefox 43.
References
- Meta: Bug 995091
- Marco Bonardo's blog post on Unified Autocomplete.
Test Cases
- Test suite is available in the form of a google spreadsheet.
Bug Work
All Dependencies
Bugzilla query error
Array ( [type] => error [message] => http-bad-status [params] => Array ( [0] => 406 [1] => Not Acceptable ) ) 1
Verified Fixed bugs
Bugzilla query error
Array ( [type] => error [message] => http-bad-status [params] => Array ( [0] => 406 [1] => Not Acceptable ) ) 1
Upcoming bug fixes
Bugzilla query error
Array ( [type] => error [message] => http-bad-status [params] => Array ( [0] => 406 [1] => Not Acceptable ) ) 1
Sign off
Criteria
- All the test cases were executed.
- All the blocker, critical, major bugs have been fixed.
Results
Aurora Sign-off
- [DISABLED] Firefox 34 (2014-09-04) - UI implementation is incomplete.
- [DISABLED] Firefox 35 (2014-10-21) - Feature is incomplete.
- [DONE] Aurora 43 (2015-09-25).
Beta Sign-off
- [DONE] Beta 43 (2015-10-30).
Release Sign-off
- [DONE] RC 43.0 (2015-12-04).