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Firefox search suggestions vs Chrome search bar auto-fill

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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I love search suggestions but only if they're drop-down (or auto-fill grayed-out like Gmail search), and Chrome keeps auto-filling the search bar while Firefox just nicely presents them in the drop-down. Gmail's search behavior seems perfect, just auto-filling in grayed-out text and letting me hit right-arrow or down-arrow to actually fill, but neither Firefox nor Chrome have this behavior yet.

I'm eternally annoyed at Chrome's behavior, and have found out how to disable auto-fill for terms I haven't even searched for, but it keeps auto-filling terms that I have searched for, causing unwanted searches.

Firefox thankfully only does a drop-down, but it would be nice to have more options with this, especially if they instituted something like Gmail's gray auto-fill then let us actually populate it with a keyboard button or mouse click.

What is Mozilla's thinking on this? They've ripped off almost everything else in Chrome, and I hope they don't force Chrome's behavior on users.

I love search suggestions but only if they're drop-down (or auto-fill grayed-out like Gmail search), and Chrome keeps auto-filling the search bar while Firefox just nicely presents them in the drop-down. Gmail's search behavior seems perfect, just auto-filling in grayed-out text and letting me hit right-arrow or down-arrow to actually fill, but neither Firefox nor Chrome have this behavior yet. I'm eternally annoyed at Chrome's behavior, and have found out how to disable auto-fill for terms I haven't even searched for, but it keeps auto-filling terms that I have searched for, causing unwanted searches. Firefox thankfully only does a drop-down, but it would be nice to have more options with this, especially if they instituted something like Gmail's gray auto-fill then let us actually populate it with a keyboard button or mouse click. What is Mozilla's thinking on this? They've ripped off almost everything else in Chrome, and I hope they don't force Chrome's behavior on users.

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If you are talking about search suggestions (i.e. not saved form data) then those are provide by the search engine website server and out of control of Firefox. Firefox shows these as provided by the website under a suggestion header.

See also: