I am not sure I fully understand from your message exactly what you are seeing, but there have been a couple of recent changes to Firefox, and these are probably what are affecting you. By default Firefox now:

1. uses Google's https search service
2. autocompletes location bar addresses, with a bias for https

Have a look at these two threads

1. remove google https 14.0.1 /questions/932674#answer-353249
   My post gives a method for adding to and changing the search bar options
2. typing in url for my company website sends it to https .... /questions/933563#answer-356371
   Jscher2000gives explanations and workarounds

Maybe if you explain in more detail what is happening, possibly with examples that can be tried it will help me to understand what you see, or maybe the above linked threads help.

its that last one exactly, i didnt realize about the trailing / but sure enough thats it. how do i stop it from doing that? normally it wouldnt be a problem but there are a few web sites that are amazingly slow on https and honestly i dont need https for every single connection. (facebook for example, for me at least is extremely slow with https and i use "social fixer" which aparantly does not take too kindly to switching around from http/https)

You set the Boolean pref browser.urlbar.autoFill to false on the about:config page to disable auto-fill on the location bar.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/about:config

See "Prevent Firefox from automatically completing URLs":

• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/search-your-bookmarks-history-and-tabs-awesome-bar

You can set the browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled pref to false on the about:config page to disable the highlighting of the domain and see the full URL more clearly.

You can set the browser.urlbar.trimURLs pref to false on the about:config page to see the http: protocol on the location bar and in the pop-up if you hover a link.

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Preferences/Preference_reference/browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Mozilla/Preferences/Preference_reference/browser.urlbar.trimURLs

so the only way is to disabled a useful feature entirely?

With auto-fill disabled you can still select an entry from the drop down list that opens when you start typing.
Personally I do not like autocomplete because it is confusing when you start typing and you want to open a completely different website than Firefox suggests.

i personally use it, if this was a dev change to push for https the devs should have just made it an option, on a laptop i can see wanting https when ever possible especially on wifi. but on a hardline connection, it just adds over head when not needed. guess ill just remove the S when its a problem until i get fed up enough to move to a different browser :: sigh :: thanks for the help