January 03, 2005

Wierd behavior in Firefox with Ctrl + Enter and URL's that begin WWWsomething...

I have a project I am working on who's domain starts with WWW (not as in WWW. but as in WWW.WWWsomethingorother -- its no where near ready to be showcased otherwise I would give the full domain.)

I think one of the truly great features of IE is exposed via the use of Ctrl + Enter after typing the second tier of a domain to get the http://www. + second tier domain + .com in its place. This feature was of course gobbled up by Firefox for obvious reasons and then extended to Shift + Enter to get the eqivalent .net domain and Shift + Ctrl + Enter to get .org. However I've just noticed that if you type in a second tier domain name that starts with WWW then it invokes instead a Google search for what it obviously sees as a search string as opposed to second tier domain. Anybody know why this is? Is this a Feature, Bug, or something else all together? I can understand that the Mozilla engine may be assuming that the first three W's is representative of the "fact" that the user has already typed in the WWW and therefore isn't looking to autocomplete which then invokes the process to send a GET request but given that the string is not recognized to be a domain the automatic push to Google as a search phrase is then invoked instead (assuming that this is ultimatelly the last "effort" the browser can make to give the user what he/she is looking for.) But it would seem that the autocomplete process would first look for the "." after the WWW before making such assumptions... anyway, no big deal... just a random wierdness that seemed worth noting.