Description of the issue: Search bar (or address bar) autocomplete suggestions are appearing in ways they aren’t supposed to, violating the autocomplete settings while doing so.
I’ve noticed that address bar autocomplete suggestions appear using the wrong string as a basis for the suggestions. If I type “yod” and there are few enough suggestible matching open tabs or recently closed tabs and searches, it adds a suggestion for Youtube and a suggestion for Youtube Music to the list of suggestions, both results appearing with the substring “you” highlighted (both in the site name and in the url). The same happens if I type “wiw”, in which case it yields suggestions for two wiki pages with “wik” highlighted. See the screenshots below, which demonstrate these two searches.
These kinds of wrong-match suggestions don’t appear for every input string, so there’s probably some list of stored urls somewhere that the wrong suggestions originate from. They appear mostly when the input string is exactly three characters long (through they remain if further characters matching the suggestions are added, e.g. turning “yod” into “yodtu” still yields suggestions for “youtube”). The highlighted part of the suggestion usually differs in just a single character from the actual input, and if it’s the third character of the input string that differs, changing only that third letter yields exactly the same suggestions (disregarding possible correct suggestions that might appear too, like “New York Times” if I change “yod” to “yor”).
Notably, Brave tends to disregard the autocomplete settings when wrong-match suggestions are involved. I have address bar autocomplete suggestions turned on in Brave’s settings, and I’ve disabled bookmark-based and Leo-based suggestions. Still, I commonly get bookmarks of pages I’ve only ever visited in private browsing mode suggested to me due to these wrong-match suggestions, even though they don’t even appear in my search history. If, however, I enter the highlighted part of the wrong-match suggestion, no such such suggestion appears at all; it’s clearly stored the bookmarked url in some indexing list or something that uses substrings of the input to quickly find useable suggestions, and it may have done that before I disabled bookmark-based suggestions a long time ago. I’m not going to provide a screenshot of suggestions for these particular bookmarks, but I will provide a similar example. Here’s a screenshot of the input “leb” yielding a suggestion for a bookmarked url with the substring “lei” highlighted. For privacy reasons, I’ve redacted part of the url.
I hope this description is detailed enough to get an idea of what might be going wrong.
How can this issue be reproduced?
I’m unable to reproduce the additional bug of suggestions appearing for bookmarks not present in the search history, but I reckon that bug’ll disappear once this one’s fixed, so I don’t think additional attention needs to be put towards that. For reproducing the wrong-match suggestions bug (on desktop with Windows), use the following steps:
- Turn on address bar autocomplete suggestions here.
- Go to Youtube Music’s history page (you don’t have to log in), then close the tab.
- Open a new tab and search for “yod”; ja suggestion for Youtube Music should appear with the substring “you” highlighted as if that were the input you entered. The same should happen if you enter “yoq” or “yow”, etc., depending on your own search history.
I’ve tried this on multiple profiles, but I only have access to a single install of Brave, so if this procedure fails to reproduce the described results on your install, please do let me know.
Expected result:
What I’d expect to happen upon typing “yod” into the address bar, is that no suggestions appear, because there are no matches in my search history or the weird catalogue of website suggestions built into Brave by default. See the screenshot below of realized expected behavior arising with the input string “pgw”:
With “leb” as input, I’d ideally get no results, but seen as “leboncoin.fr” is a built-in suggestion, I’d expect to see only that suggested result.
Regardless of all this, I mainly expect to not get suggested bookmarked pages not present in the search history if I’ve disabled bookmark-based suggestions in the settings.
It’s possible that this phenomenon of results being suggested that match strings similar to the one actually given is one of Brave’s or Chromium’s intended features, but if so, it’s badly and inconsistently implemented and lacks the option to be disabled in the settings; and it also violates the configuration settings for bookmark-based suggestions. So it definitely needs to be overhauled then.
Brave Version( check About Brave): Version 1.61.109 Chromium: 120.0.6099.144 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Additional Information: no additional information required