Firefox address bar aka awesome bar starts to show suggestions in a drop down menu when you start typing, you can then select any URL by using mouse pointer or with the up/down arrow keys. Firefox had “browser.urlbar.autoFill” preference which is turned off by default for ages now, Mozilla decided to turn on by default for Firefox 14 Beta, which we’ve covered recently.
Improved Autocomplete Predictions Comes to Gmail Search
This feature fills URL automatically in the address bar when you type, however best match found by awesome bar may not be what you’re wanting to visit that’s one downside. Another downside is of this feature when compared to Chrome’s Omni box is instead of showing the full page URL of most visited site it only fills website URL, for example, when you’ve visited “ http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/release-preview” in the past it now fills “Windows.Microsoft.com/” only when you type “win” however you can select the full URL from dropdown also.
Google Scribe Provides AutoComplete Suggestions as you Type
Here Firefox stopping its Autocomplete of URL at URL fragment separator i.e. at ‘Windows.Microsoft.com/“ while Chrome autocompletes the full URL for you. Though with this feature in place you can also select a URL from suggestions in the drop down, in case if you don’t find this feature useful, you can disable it here is how.
Disabling Firefox’s Awesome bar URL Autocomplete feature
1. Type about:config in the address bar and press enter.
2. Find “browser.urlbar.autoFill” preference and set its value to “False”.
Thanks for the tip!
thanks. i hate that being made default. >>
Thanks. Autofill is annoying.
My main problem with Autofill is that if I’m skipping through different combinations of letters to decide where to visit, I need to double-tap the backspace key to delete letters every time.
That exactly was my problem, too. Thanks so much to the author of this article!
Hi this is venkat, author of this article! you’re welcome.
Thanks a lot for the tip.
My issue with autofill is that it doesn’s choose the top (best) match from awesome bar, which is often the one I want because it tends to select sites I visit most. Instead, it seems to pick an arbitrary URL from recent history I’ve possibly visited once.
You’re welcome.
Thank you! It was driving me crazy! And to Alvaro… even though I disabled this autofill suggestion thing, my autofill still pulls from my history to fill in the address of the places I go to all the time.
Thank you so much for this. I’m glad they like Google Chrome’s auto-fill, but I hated it, and it’s one reason I stuck with Firefox.
Thank you!
@KarenX the autofull forms/history is a completely different story from what this post suggests. You need to go to Tools>Options>Privacy and disable the history recording from there (for forms and browsing).
The post bellow, it just disables that annoying URL filler (which caused me to mistype a URL a hundred of times LoL).
Thanks! This was killing my keywords for bookmarks and searches.
Thanks for posting the fix for this, it was very annoying.
I tried the “fix” restarted FF and I still get the annoying list of sites FF thinks I might be looking for as I’m typing a url. Grrr…..
Thank you! I hate it when programs are trying to be smarter than they’re supposed to :)
Thanks! I’ve regularly been going to the wrong address with this “feature”.
it helps, thank you very much.
the bookmark keyword feature is quite handy , but the url autocompletion can be really annoying when I input a keyword.