Bug#805551: auto-completion of domains hides webmaster errors

[Daniel Pocock]

Package: iceweasel
Version: 41.0.1-1~bpo80+1
Severity: important

When publishing content on my blog, I normally click the links in
Iceweasel to verify they are all working.

Yesterday, I included a link to http://drucall.org and it appeared to be
working.  However, there was no A, AAAA or CNAME record for drucall.org
org and the correct link should have been http://www.drucall.org

This problem wasn't obvious when I clicked the link to test it because
Iceweasel silently converted it to www.drucall.org.

Many of my other domains do a redirect to add or remove www, so this
didn't catch my eye.

As a consequence of Iceweasel undermining my link testing, the blog went
live with a link that was broken from the perspective of some other users.

I've also seen other problems with the auto-completion of domains on
many intranets where internal DNS suffixes are used.

Maybe this behavior should not be enabled by default, perhaps the first
time the user mis-types a domain they should be shown a pop-up and the
auto-completion should only be attempted if they agree to it.

Alternatively, maybe it should only be attempted for domains typed in
the address bar manually and not when using links in pages.