I can't completely delete all my browsing history, still getting search suggestions in address bar!
Here goes nothing, as they say...
My 'Awesome' Bar suggestions setting is purely for browsing history.
When I delete Everything - with all categories ticked - under Clear Recent History, I still find url suggestions for some of the sites that I've visited, including Amazon and eBay. I can't figure out where the persistent history data is located that is causing this to happen or how to block persistent data from the root so it doesn't happen at all.
I've tried using "forget about this site" by right-clicking a site within "Show All History" and selecting that option, but nada, still appears in url bar when starting to type.
The address bar is set to search terms using DuckDuckGo but I haven't allowed any suggestions of any kind from the search engine.
I. Am. Stumped. Is this an IndexedDB thing, an Sqlite thing? Where is this persistent data being stored and how do I get rid of it and block sites from using this feature? Do I have to go into about:config?
Help.
All Replies (5)
Firefox shows some default suggestions when no items are available for filing (i.e. you removed them all or are in a new/clean profile).
- chrome://global/content/unifiedcomplete-top-urls.json
- Bug 1211726 - Pre-seed awesomebar (location bar) with a list of top web sites for better autocompletion on empty profiles
(please do not comment in bug reports
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html)
Right. Answering my own post here...
I just found out that when - and only when - I delete all my bookmarks, I don't get those address bar suggestions... But when I restore my bookmarks, the suggestions re-appear.
I have definitely 100% disabled the address bar suggestions except for "browsing history". I even tried enabling bookmark suggestions to see if, by some twisted quirk, they might be disabled, but no. I tried checking settings in about:config, but they are as expected.
Closer but still no dice! Some kind of corruption? I don't want to have to re-install Firefox.
Do you have bookmarks that have a keyword in case that might trigger it?
If you would only remove bookmarks from sites that show as a suggestion, do you still get other suggestions instead?
Hello cor-el, thanks for helping.
Erm, I'm not familiar with keywords within Firefox. If you mean within the greater context of Windows, I don't have any keywords or trigger words set up.
Firefox is accessing *all* the bookmarks. I've tested it.
Note: when I turn off all url bar suggestions incl. browsing history, that definitely kills all suggestions. Not sure that helps, but worth mentioning to remove doubt.
Clearly bookmark suggestions option is stuck in "on" and can't be turned off by any means that I can see.
Modified by morningster
Right, two things...
1) I realised that it's not "suggestions" that is my problem as such but "autocompletion". The problem is that as I begin to type, autocompletion fills in using a bookmark - there are no suggestions below. Sorry for any confusion.
2) I just found a thread on Mozilla Support and followed the approach there to disable URL Bar AutoFill in about:config. Now my typing is not autocompleted with bookmarked sites.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1067077
This is still a bug though. Possibly started when I updated Firefox to the latest version but I'm not sure.