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

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).