mordant wit

Many users of Mozilla and Firefox have discovered an unusual bug when dealing with Malformed URLs. For instance, if you copy and paste the address http//www.google.com into your URL bar, you will most likely be redirected to Microsoft's web site.


What's Wrong with Mozilla?

At first, many people assume that this is a bug in the way Mozilla handles malformed URLs. The bug actually has been reported to the Mozilla and Firefox development teams, but they refuse to fix it because it isn't a problem with the web browser.

When Mozilla is given an invalid URL, it doesn't attempt to determine the actual URL. Instead, it performs a google search and returns the first matching web page. So if you type Amazon into the URL bar, it will take you to amazon.com.


The Real Problem

The real problem that is causing these malformed URLs to redirect to Microsoft lies in google's page ranking algorithm. Through some (possibly malicious) means, the top result for the search term http is Microsoft's web site. Aside from causing confusion, this is also somewhat absurd, since Microsoft is neither the creator, nor maintainer of the HyperText Transfer Protocol. Realistically, the search term should return the World Wide Web Consortium's page on the HTTP protocol. Currently, the w3c is ranked second for the search term.