<Glazblog/>

Future problems for browsers' address bar ?

By glazou on Monday 23 June 2008, 15:02 - Mozilla - Permalink

All major browsers have a common feature : if you type something in the adress bar that is not a URL or the address part of a URL, a call to the preferred search engine is made. To do that, you have two choices :

  1. you check if the string in the address bar is a (partial) URL or not. That's not that hard. The number of TLDs is limited and we know how to parse URLs.
  2. you assume the string IS a network address anyway and ask the network layer of your computer to resolve it. If the answer is negative, then shmoogle it.

Of course, the latter has a higher cost. But the former deeply relies on the fact the list of TLDs is limited and well known.

Click in your address bar and type "qsdqsdqs.info" then press the return key. It looks and smells like a partial URL because "info" is a known TLD. FIrefox then tries to reach http://qsdqsdqs.info and that's what you were looking for.

Now the ICANN wants to entirely open up the list of TLDs. I will be able, in 2009, to register the "glazman" TLD !!! SO is the string "daniel.glazman" a web site's address or a string I am looking for through a search engine ?...

Comments

1. On Monday 23 June 2008, 15:56 by hasbeen

so you'd be able to register both glazman.museum and museum.glazman when you're over the hill :P

2. On Monday 23 June 2008, 15:58 by Dam

As far as I can see .. FF3 only cares about network addresses in the url bar ...
And I suppose it is right because it has a specific search bar just aside. And in FF2 I never used the URL bar as a search engine because i'm not so "lucky" ...

3. On Monday 23 June 2008, 16:53 by Da Scritch

How can we be sure for TLD legacy, now ? How many a company will reasonably buy domain names ?
can you imagine the amount of websites having a script to test e-mail adresse where they filters by national TLD and some commons (.com, .net, .museum) ?

I will bet a lot of these new TLD will become spammers' heaven.

4. On Monday 23 June 2008, 18:23 by Sure

We should let people pick personal names for their countries and cities too. Your address could be...

D. Glazman
Rue de Glazman
Glazmanville
Glazland

And the point would be:P Honestly, ICANN can let people register whatever TLD they like -- and the rest of the internet can refuse to recognize them. Isn't choice a fine thing ;)

5. On Monday 23 June 2008, 20:19 by dmp

Daniel, we already have some (live) examples to play with (ICANN):

http://نمونہ.آزمایشی

http://xn--hhbbbh02d.xn--hgbk6aj7f5...

Both are the same, obviously (?).

True, there is little chance to confuse "xn--hgbk6aj7f53bba" with a google search ;) - but still, the "naive" approach (/me points his finger) that consists in validating urls against a simple regexp aggregating known tlds is *already* a failure (not to mention you can surely use a browser outside the "internet" - and (http://)daniel.glazman may be a perfectly legit working URL already on a given subnet - as long as the name do resolve for the client...).

IMHO, there is simply no way to tell (guess) a "user question" from an iri...

ttyl

6. On Monday 23 June 2008, 20:23 by Mark

Please, DO NOT even consider searching for something if a DNS lookup fails. I get sick of searching for 'localhost' or some other local name.

Choice #1 is the only sane one.

7. On Monday 23 June 2008, 20:54 by xeen

Where's the problem here? Firefox doesn't do a search engine lookup when you enter "daniel.glazman" into the URL bar.
A sane thing to do though would be to add a button "Search [Default Engine here] next to the "Try again" button to make it more comfy for the users if they can't exactly how it's spelled (i.e. and enter daniel.glasman). On the other hand… there are already extensions that add links for the most common search engines to that page.

Greetings
xeen
PS: Could you expand the width/height of this textbox? It's tiny, and for some reason Resizeable Textareas doesn't work.