Google search result's main links doesn't work in tabs other then "All".

[GuptTmay]

Describe the bug
On Google Search, if I’m inside a tab other than “All” (e.g. Videos, News, Web), the result's main links don’t open when triggered using Vimium hints.

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Go to URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=hello+world
2. Switch to the Videos tab.
3. Trying opening any result's main links (Video Titles) using its vimium hints.
4. Nothing happens

Browser and Vimium version

• Chromium Browser: 139.0.7258.66 (Official Build) (64-bit)
• Firefox Browser: 141.0.2
• OS: Linux
• Vimium Version: 2.3

[blindstitch]

Been annoying me for so long now. I use udm=14 and this affects me too. I have been using the hint that is over the site icon instead, but I tend to get hit by this bug every other time. The issue is a <br> inside the link <a> that somehow breaks Vimium's hint or target. This userscript deletes those <br>s inside the <a> and inserts new ones in the dom before it.

https://gist.github.com/blindstitch/95a8a23e32a5a88454275eb8c02b6788

[philg-dev]

Hey @blindstitch that's a really great find! How did you even find that issue? I was looking into it a week or so ago for a little while, but couldn't find the cause for the bug... But I just tested your claim and removing the <br> from the <a> element does indeed fix the issue.

I'll probably give it another shot soon to see if I can find out what Vimium's LinkHints dislike about <br> tags inside links. Maybe it's an easter egg that some web designer added 😆 I heard they loathe <br> tags in general.

Would be nice if we can fix that bug on Vimium's end of course.

[blindstitch]

I found it by using the dev tools to drag the element around in the dom. I have no idea how you'd fix it in the plugin (I am not an extension developer) but I imagine that the more stuff one jams into the the more likely it is to break vimium's hint target. Youtube is also getting quite bad for this with the 4 or so overlapping hints that the video player buttons use. Thank you to @GuptTmay for pointing out the scope of the issue.

[philc]

@GuptTmay thanks for the nicely written bug.

@blindstitch that's fascinating. If one deletes the
tag in the anchor, you'll see that the anchor is now placed under the span. This must be causing a less optimal element to be hinted. I didn't trace out what the link hints code is doing when the anchor has a
vs not. If this continues to be an issue in the future, a minimal test case would make it easier to debug.

Note that this issue affects the Web, News, Books, and Videos tabs possibly others.

Ultimately, two hints are being shown for each search result, and only one has an effect when clicked. This sounds very similar to #4303, where this problem manifested on the All tab for a time (and thus was much more noticed by users) before it was changed by Google.

I just merged this fix (6143e45) proposed on that thread, which favors clickable children of clickable spans, instead of the spans themselves. Now, only one, functional hint per result is shown on the Web tab, which resolves this issue.

The risk of this fix is that there may be some websites where one needs separate link hints for both the span and the clickable child of the span. That doesn't sound like a reasonable web layout to me, but I guess it's possible. I didn't see any obvious hints issues in my testing on Github, Youtube, and Google.com, and from casual browsing of the web. I'll leave this fix merged for now. Please report if you see any important hints which no longer work because of this fix; if it needs to be reverted generally, then we can special-case it for google.com.