This has been happening for a while and I can't reliably reproduce it.

This is caused by me inadvertently hitting the touchbar to change where the searching is happening.

I'm not sure what we can do about this other than replace search tokens with a nicer UX that doesn't use tokens at all -- which Verdi is planning on doing at some point iirc, but even then you'd still end up in a different mode -- or get rid of the touchbar buttons altogether. What would you suggest? You can at least customize your touchbar and remove them.

(In reply to Drew Willcoxon :adw from comment #2)

I'm not sure what we can do about this other than replace search tokens with a nicer UX that doesn't use tokens at all

Even if we'd replace the UI, the touchbar problem would stay, it would just flip on the new UI.
I'm not even sure it is exactly our fault, I had problems with the Mac touchbar from when I got it, I inadvertently keep touching it while typing, my opinion about this hardware feature is very negative.

needinfo-ing Harry just as an heads up, since he worked a lot on the touchbar UI.

Thanks for the ni?. I agree that it's too easy to accidentally hit the Touch Bar, which why we don't allow the Touch Bar to perform destructive actions like closing a tab/window. Apple has increased the distance between the top row of the keyboard and the Touch Bar on its latest MBPs, but of course that still leaves all of us with the older MBPs that have the Touch Bar crammed up against the keyboard :)

If you want to disable this feature, go to Firefox > Customize Touch Bar... in the menu bar. You can drag the item called "search shortcuts" out of your Touch Bar. Depending on your locale, you may have to drag another item out first to reveal it. You may also have to restart Firefox for this feature to completely disappear. If you want to completely disable Firefox's Touch Bar functionality, you can just drag all items out of the Touch Bar in the customization window.

I think having a better UI would be sufficient for solving this problem. If it was more obvious how to map what's on the touchbar to what you see changed in url bar I don't think I would have filed this issue.

Another problem that I just noticed is that those shortcuts don't actually do a useful thing when you hit enter.
If you type "Hamburger", touch "Bookmarks" on the touch bar and then hit enter you end up searching on Google for "% Hamburger". I'm pretty sure nobody would ever want that behaviour.

Yeah, "* hamburger" restricts urlbar results to bookmarks that match "hamburger". It's not actually related to what happens when you press enter. The fact that the touchbar says "Search in" might be confusing since it's really restricting urlbar results, and it's not about "searching" using your default engine. But I'm not sure how to convey that concisely.

But why do we make it easy to search for "% Hamburger"? Surely the restricting token shouldn't be included in the search query.

We should maybe exclude leading restriction tokens. You can use trailing restriction tokens too, and iirc we used to exclude trailing tokens from queries when you press enter, but people complained. I don't recall whether we've ever tried excluding leading tokens... Maybe Marco remembers.

Looks like we removed both leading and trailing tokens up to and including 68 and then stopped in 69. I'll try to find the bug.

Bug 1560228 is it. We started removing only leading ? tokens. People were doing searches for "C#" and the # was getting stripped since # is another restriction token. Potentially hashtags too, where the # would be leading. These cases are unavoidable as long as we keep these tokens around.