Comment 5 for bug 237315

Eventually we want person fields to have an autocomplete menu, rather than a skody iframe. Autocomplete operates on strict substrings, which is a fundamentally different syntax from a full-blown search. For example, typing -it.org into Firefox's address field should, and does, offer any URLs you have visited on ubuntu-it.org. Nobody expects it to offer every URL in their browser history except for those on it.org, as that would almost always be useless. The same would apply to a person auto-complete field in Launchpad: someone entering -de pretty obviously wouldn't want to see a menu of everyone in Launchpad except those called "de".

So the question is whether it's better for the iframe search to work the way a full-blown person search works now, or the way the autocomplete search eventually will work. I think the latter would be better, first because it would fix this timeout, and second because it would make the autocomplete easier to implement later. Whatever solution we decide, though, the actual problem is fully described and therefore not Incomplete.