Subject: Re: bug#42134: icecat: can't go back to duckduckgo search results

From: Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 08 Jul 2020 23:08:13 -0400

Hello!

Jonathan Brielmaier <[email-masked]> writes:

> When you search for something with DuckDuckGo, click on a result and
> then click on your browsers back button you end up at DDGs start page
> and not the results page.
>
> 1. Enter "guix" in your search/address bar while having DDG as default
> search engine.
> 2. Click on first result -> guix.gnu.org
> 3. Now click after landing at our beautiful website on the browsers back
> button (<-)
> 4. You end up at https://duckduckgo.com/?ia=web and not at
> https://duckduckgo.com/?q=guix
>
> This does NOT happen when you
> 1. use DuckDuckGo in Chromium via it's address bar
> 2. use DDG in Icecat starting from duckduckgo.com and not the
> address/search bar
> 3. use Bing or Google via Icecat's address/search bar
>
> I have disabled the "Spoof Referers" setting which comes from Icecat and
> is available at about:preferences#privacy
>
> Icecat has some custom DDG search plugin:
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuzilla.git/tree/makeicecat#n172
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuzilla.git/tree/data/searchplugins/duckduckgo.xml
>
> Maybe that's breaking that. I don't know.

This was already reported upstream here:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnuzilla/2020-02/msg00000.html.
Another user reported the same behavior wwhen using Tor browser.  It
seems to be an issue with DDG itself, where their HTML only website
breaks when Javascript support is detected.

You can verify this by re-enabling LibreJS in Icecat; it'll suddenly
start working again.

Maxim