"Open Frame in New Tab" caused google search!

[Shadowcat]

I haven't been able to repeat this bug since shortly after it occurred. (I was able to immediately repeat it when it first happened, but the behaviour returned to normal soon afterwards for some reason...)

I'm using the 2002-12-03 Win32 nightly build.

I was working on a local web site with a domain of "demo134" (e.g. http://demo134/foo/bar/blah.html) and the current page was a frame-set, of which I was interested in only one of the frames, so I opened the context menu, and clicked on "This Frame" -> "Open Frame in New Tab". The new tab opened, and started pulling in a page from www.usc.edu !! After a moment of staring, I noticed that the tab name for this unexpected page was "demo134" (and the file name itself was "demo134.html") and so I tried a google search for demo134 and sure enough this page turned up at the head of the list. It seems that Phoenix had done a Google "I feel lucky" search on the domain name.

Google is my default quick-search site, but I don't believe I'd accessed the quick-search since starting the browser, and there's nothing in that context menu that I could have clicked by mistake to get this behaviour (and I was able to immediately repeat the effect, so I'm certain I wasn't clicking something else accidentally.)

I tried to see if the other "Open Frame in ... " options did the same thing, but they either caused the problem to go away, or it had solved itself before I tried those options. Either way, everything was fine from this point on.

[laszlo]

You've just discovered a "feature" . If Pheonix doesn't recognize an URL as a keyword and is unable to resolve the address, it will do a "lucky search" on Google. This is configured by the following pref, which you can adapt to your needs:

user_pref("keyword.URL", "http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q=");

Use for example the following to do a conventional search instead:

user_pref("keyword.URL", "http://www.google.com/search?q=");

[Shadowcat]

Thanks laszlo.

It turned out that our server has been having some issues. Obviously demo134 wasn't available at the time I tried to open that frame, so Phoenix did its search instead. When the server came back to life, the problem went away. (It's now died again and so I'm getting the searches...)

I have to wonder whether this behaviour of Phoenix is a good idea... Sure, if you enter a URL <em>manually</em> in the address bar, this behaviour is reasonable. But if you're trying to refresh a previously-loaded page as I was, and there's a temporary web-server or DNS issue, you should most definitely be shown an appropriate error message!

I think that Phoenix needs to know the method that was used to access the URL, and only use the search feature if it was a manually-typed address.

[laszlo]

I totally agree, that's why I used quotation marks on the word feature above. Probably nobody would ever want to search Google when there's a blind link on a page.