Overview

Sprint lead: Matthew Noorenberghe (MattN)
Sprinters: dolske
QA: tracy

Description

Form autocomplete should rank its suggestions using an awesomebar-like frecency algorithm. It should also do substring matches on previously entered entries.

Goals / Use Cases

The form autocomplete currently just shows an alphabetically-sorted list of all matching values (which are tied to the fieldname). This isn't ideal -- frequently or recently used items are buried in the list, instead of floating to the top where they can be more easily accessed. Only prefix matches are shown in the dropdown which is not very useful if the user does not remember the exact text of the previous entry

Non Goals

Eventually it would probably be interesting to implement adaptive-learning, and match across fieldnames (eg, consider <input name="address"> and <input name="addr">).

Design

See Firefox/Namoroka/Improved form history

Bugs

• bug 370117 - form autocomplete should sort by frequency of use
  • review+ (dolske) LANDED 1.9.2
• bug 446247 - Autocomplete should match any part of the string
  • review+ (dolske) LANDED 1.9.2

Non-goal bugs

• bug 444728 - autocomplete disregards maxlength for input fields
  • review+ (dolske) LANDED 1.9.2
  • superreview+ (mconnor)
• bug 487556 - satchel should send a notification when adding/removing/changing an item
  • review? (dolske)

Recommendations for the future

• Remove/hide some of the new preferences
• Look into adaptive learning for form history (to learn what entry is selected for a given input)
• Consider showing matches from other form fields