User:GijsKruitbosch/OutreachyWinter2016

Improve the first-run experience of Firefox's location bar

Mentor: Gijs Kruitbosch (Gijs on IRC)

Background

Firefox's location bar currently uses your bookmarks, history and search engine to provide you with useful search results. When you're a new Firefox user, your bookmarks and history are empty, and so the initial experience can feel disorienting and unhelpful.

Project

We'd like to provide users with an initial set of "autocompletion" results that provide domains that they are likely to navigate to. So that even when you're a new user, if you type in "face", we autocomplete to "facebook.com", and so on.

Previous experience

You should have previous experience with JavaScript, to the point where you should find completing the "Cash Registry" tasks in https://www.codecademy.com/learn/javascript (Syllabus, under Objects II) straightforward.

Previous experience with either mercurial or git would also be helpful.

What you can do to get involved

• read through the bug and ask me any questions you have
• set up the source tree and create an "artifact build" of Firefox so you can quickly change JS, test it and submit patches;
• look at how UnifiedComplete.startSearch, the Search constructor, and Search's executeSearch method in UnifiedComplete.js work together to execute a unified complete search.