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Random FireFox URL handling Behavior

About a year ago I discovered this by accident and hadn't seen it published anywhere so thought it was worth mentioning. If you enter the following into the firefox URL bar it will follow them to www.cnn.com.

  • [http://www.cnn.com]
  • [http://]www.cnn.com
  • [http://www].cnn.com
  • Etc...

You can also substitute [] for {} or " and it will also work (I haven't bothered enumerating/posting each one, but you get the idea). Now if you hyperlink using the following link it will follow them.

Maybe someone will find this useful in some way :)

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I thought I had something like this once... Eitherway, if you run http headers you will see it is the autosearch feature doing a 302 redirect from google search with the invalid domain (in the address bar) pointed to the correct domain.


ie and ff also allow http:cnn.com in the address bar. these variants aren't allowed anywhere else i know of though.


Seeems, with FF it does not work on https.


right. i've tried with FF it does't work on https format. some people say it work on chrome, but i never been tried


Actually, it seems to work on any site, it can be really interesting to avoid link limitations on some sites, where you can't post a link, even if it is useful.

I'll think about it, maybe there is something to do. But on the contrary, on IE, it is not working, neither on Chrome... Weird.

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