"Reaction [beta]"
I'm lovin' S 10 Nov 2006
For some inexplicable reason I just typed "s" into Firefox's address bar and hit Enter. Guess where I ended up? McDonalds!
Weird!?
This got me wondering where the rest of the alphabet led, so I typed in every letter and came up with the following list:
- A is for A list apart - a monthly mag for web developers
- B is for BSI Groups - the national standards body for the UK
- C is for the C programming language's Wikipedia entry
- D is for the Physical Review D journal
- E is for E! Online - Hollywood gossip rag
- F is for F-Secure Corporation - purveyor of virus/security software
- G is for Google mail (gmail)
- H is for Hard OCP - gaming news
- I is for ifilm - YouTube clone
- J is for J Records - a recording company
- K is for K Records - another recording company
- L is for The Council of Europe - "the continent's oldest political organisation"
- M is for Microsoft
- N is for The N - US teen TV show
- O is for O'Reilly - tech book publisher
- P is for Paragraphs, lines and phrases - in the W3C's HTML4 spec
- Q is for Q music magazine
- R is for The R Project for Statistical Computing
- S is for McDonald's
- T is for Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority
- U is for the University of Alberta in Canada
- V is for "V for Vendetta" - the movie featuring Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving
- W is for W Hotels - the Starwood business hotel chain
- X is for The X.org Foundation - providers of an open source implementation of the X Window System
- Y is for Yahoo! Mail
- Z is for Z magazine - "an independent monthly magazine dedicated to resisting injustice, defending against repression, and creating liberty"
At first, we thought that Mozilla might be auctioning off letters to the highest bidder. This isn't the case though. What's actually happening is a little more complex. When you type a letter into Firefox's address bar (or indeed, anything else that isn't a valid URL), the browser submits it to Google as a search query. Google then searches for this info in "I'm Feeling Lucky" mode, meaning that you are automatically forwarded to the top-ranking result. Thus, when you type "a", you go to alistapart.com!
Next article: Assistive technologies and IE7
Previous article: Etre at NNG's User Experience 2006
6 comments so far
Dustin 10 Nov 2006 04:25 PM
I'm running Firefox 2 and don't get the same result when typing the letter in the address bar.
It just tries www.s.com
There may be a setting or download to enable the google lucky search
Etre 10 Nov 2006 04:38 PM
Dustin: I think your default search engine has to be set to Google.
To check, type "about:config" in FF's address bar and hit Enter, then find the Keyword.URL filter on the subsequent settings page.
My Keyword.URL value reads "http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I'm Feeling Lucky&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=" (which, as you can see, explains the "I'm Feeling Lucky" behaviour)
I\\\'m having the same problem 13 Nov 2006 05:25 PM
I have the keyword.url set to "http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I'm Feeling Lucky&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q="
but still does not work as in previous versions of firefox. Browser directs to propositional dot-coms rather than to the feeling lucky page. This is a big flaw. Do I have to use the previous version of firefox to get peace of mind?
Etre 13 Nov 2006 05:38 PM
Is your Keyword.enabled filter set to true? If not, this is likely the problem :)
Old version was better 19 Dec 2006 08:54 AM
I'm having this same problem. Firefox 2 uses these odd propositional dot-coms rather than the first page in Google search (feeling lucky). Also I'm not able to write sentences to the address field. Firefox says that the URL is bad and it cannot be loaded.
I have checked that the options are correct but this does not help.
Old version was better, but it crashed on my computer frequently. Please help!
Elaina Technophile 27 Apr 2007 02:28 PM
Same here. Browser directs to propositional dot-coms rather than to the feeling lucky page. This is a VERY big flaw.