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How to make address bar less smart?

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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How can I make the address bar in Firefox to:

1. Only treat the input as URL if it looks like a valid URL (i.e. starts with scheme://...)

2. Only search if the input is prefixed with a search keyword. E.g. "g foobar" would do Google search for "foobar"

3. Anything else (including non-FQDN addresses and the likes) would just show an error page, without trying to resolve the address or perform a search with it.

How can I make the address bar in Firefox to: 1. Only treat the input as URL if it looks like a valid URL (i.e. starts with scheme://...) 2. Only search if the input is prefixed with a search keyword. E.g. "g foobar" would do Google search for "foobar" 3. Anything else (including non-FQDN addresses and the likes) would just show an error page, without trying to resolve the address or perform a search with it.

Modified by zirahvi

All Replies (2)

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1. No this is no longer possible from my testing. I am still looking for a bug.

2. This used to work, I could not get it to Keywords: https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html per reddit thread I found, tags worked:

However, that did not appear to work either. The Keyword Bookmarks add on is no longer supported in the

3. I don't see this a possible at the moment. I disabled all the search features and could not get an error, it always defaulted to a search on the default search engine.

Perhaps others have a suggestion?

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You can set keyword.enabled to false to stop Firefox from searching if you type only one word. Firefox will however still try to add the http:// protocol and fixup the URL (prefix www. and postfix .com, see the browser.fixup.alternate.* prefs; fixup only works for the http protocol). If this fails then you get the error page. I'm not aware of a way to prevent Firefox from adding the http: protocol.