Breaking url-bar search

[Tyler Downer]

William,
This change was made because of a very significant portion of our users 
having a keyword.url pref that had been hijacked by an add-on and then 
unable to turn it back to what they actually want (due to the pref being 
hidden in about:config). There is an add-on to restore the previous 
functionality if you'd like, 
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/keyword-search/.

Tyler Downer
User Advocate for All Things Firefoxy

On 8/15/13 7:31 AM, William Pietri wrote:
> Hi! I'm writing in regard to this bug:
>
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=738818
>
> I spent the last day or so swearing because suddenly every attempt I 
> made to Google something was giving me a useless Wikipedia search. In 
> the middle of trying to repair a downed server, this was deeply 
> frustrating. Now that I had some time to look, it took me a fair bit 
> of searching this morning to discover that this was an intentional 
> change.
>
> I have some concerns about how this happened, but first I'm wondering: 
> on what sort of data was the decision made? In the bug discussions, I 
> see my use case dismissed as "not a real-world concern", but I'm not 
> seeing any reference to actual usage numbers. And there's a reference 
> to data about hijacking. What data was there about use of this feature?
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> William
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