Policy needed: "Go to an intranet site for a one-word entry in the Address bar"

[ToMMeR]

For enterprise a policy like the one in IE called "Go to an intranet site for a one-word entry in the Address bar" is very needed.

As an enterprise we have a lot of intranet sites and services using one-word hostnames and abreviations like "mc", "servicedesk" etc. that our users are used to just being able to type in their browser.
In Edge that will just launch a search on Google or Bing instead. Teaching the users to type http:// every time is nearly impossible and not very user friendly.

We use the policy in IE, but it sadly never came to Edge. It would be great if it could be added to the new Edge (Chromium) admx.

[#2]

This is awesome.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-policies#gotointranetsiteforsinglewordent...

[#3]

Hi everyone,

Just a brief update that the search fallback behavior is now on by default (no command-line flag needed) if this policy is enabled in the Beta channel as Beta has reached version 81.

If you plan to deploy the Stable channel of Edge throughout your organization, this policy will include the search fallback behavior without any command-line flags necessary to enable it, when the Stable channel reaches version 81.

Please test this out in Beta and let us know if anything is not working as expected.

Thank you!
Jared

[#4]

Is this GPO broken in Dev V84?

[#5]

Thank you for the head's up, @Thilo Langbein.  First, I hope you and everyone else in this community is safe and well.

The policy seems to have been omitted from the latest published ADMX and ADML files.  I'll look into why that took place and work to get the policy back ASAP.

I apologize for this inconvenience and I'll update this thread when I have an ETA for the policy's return to the administrative templates. 

[#6]

@JaredB81 Thanks. Policy sems to be inplace and is shown under edge://policy but it doesn't work in Dev84.

[#7]

@Thilo Langbein, thanks for the clarification.  The policy did get into the template files but a change from Chromium upstream broke the implementation of the policy if configured.

The fix has been in Edge Canary for a few days and the latest Dev build has the fix as well.  Please test with the latest Dev build and let us know if you encounter any issues.  

Thank you and again, I apologize for the inconvenience this caused! 

[#8]

@JaredB81 With Dev 84.0.495.2 one-word-intranet has come back. Thanks folks.

[#9]

@JaredB81 did this get reverted?

I had a request for this within my organisation and implemented expecting the search behaviour mentioned in the thread but it appears it is back to behaving like the original implementation.

Entering google changes the address bar to google/ and fails to google search instead.

entering whatisthemeaningoflife gives me a failed page rather than a search.

I checked the policy docs and even they make no mention of the search fallback. They still talk about single word searches failing.

Is this intended?

Edit: I think I've worked out why its not working, if its still working for everyone else. On a failed DNS request our orgs DNS responds with a custom response page. Will keep testing. I'll leave this here as a note that the docs (and ADMX description) have not been updated to reflect the search fallback.

[#10]

@OliverS91 It still works in our organization, so it must be because of your custom DNS response

[#11]

GoToIntranetSiteForSingleWordEntryInAddressBar-GPO seems to bee broken since version 90. One word search is routed to Google/Bing immediately - intranet server isn't found anymore.

[#12]

@Thilo Langbein Hello!  I see an update/fix was made for the GoToIntranetSiteForSingleWordEntryInAddressBar policy in MS Edge versions 92.0.873.0+.   I believe we are working on releasing to other Channels as well.  Thanks! 

-Kelly

[#13]

Yes, 92.x brings back this functionality.

[#14]

@Kelly_Y 
An affected user noticed recently that the documentation for this policy still refers exclusively to a single word without punctuation even though it was extended to accept both hyphens and dots. Is this intentional? I can imagine why it might be, so I haven't submitted feedback about the discrepancy.

[#15]

@Noel Burgess Hi!  Jared is no longer with the team so I'll check who would be able to help and take a look at the policy description.  Thanks! 

-Kelly