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How to turn off text suggestions?

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  • 14 have this problem
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  • Last reply by cor-el

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Whenever I start typing something FF 4.0.1 is displaying everything I have ever entered on the same website in same window if it contains the text fragment just typed, which is nice in adress bar but incredibly annoying everywhere else. How can I turn it off? Clearing cache every time is out of the question and unchecking "Search for text when I start typing" in general advanced options didn't help.

Whenever I start typing something FF 4.0.1 is displaying everything I have ever entered on the same website in same window if it contains the text fragment just typed, which is nice in adress bar but incredibly annoying everywhere else. How can I turn it off? Clearing cache every time is out of the question and unchecking "Search for text when I start typing" in general advanced options didn't help.

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To remove use of the AwesomeBar, use ...
Tools > Options > Privacy > When using the location bar, suggest: Nothing


How the AwesomeBar works

The "AwesomeBar" (Location Bar Autocomplete) is a very valuable tool that was introduced in Firefox 3. It is a usage based report based on your usage history and bookmarks completely based on information strictly local to your machine. The idea is that you can type strings of characters with the strings in any order and Firefox will produce the list before/until you press Enter. Search engines use word to find sites, the AwesomeBar works strictly from character strings.

The "Awesomebar" works well, but the thing that is wrong with it is that it:

  1. two line (plus separator) is very distracting and a waste of space
  2. does not return enough hits to be useful

Those two items can be rectified with extensions

  1. oldbar :: Add-ons for Firefox
    Changes listing from two line entry to single line entries, minimizing distracting multiplle fontsizes and colors
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/oldbar/
  2. Locationbar Limit :: Add-ons for Firefox
    My choice on options: 30 hits visible, 80 hits scrollable
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/locationbar-limit/

For instance, I could find the two links above by typing

  • oldbar
  • location bar limit

into the location bar without regard for word boundaries, in the case of the second search. I could have typed addons loc bar as it looks into url and titles.

As you type the hits get narrowed down and the fact that page is bookmarked (bookmark star) is what I most tend to look for.

For help working with your bookmarks and history see


It takes about three weeks of usage for the AwesomeBar to work well, during that time you can elevate something by pasting the url into the location bar and entering it three times (typed has a high rank), you can demote something by selecting it and using the "Del" key which will only affect history not bookmark components.

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See:

  • Tools > Options > Privacy > History: "Remember search and form history"