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How do I prevent Firefox from automatically making the root path of a website the first suggestion in the address bar?

Ciege
Ciege
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Whenever I visit a website, even if I manually type in a full URL, Firefox will automatically add the root path of that website to the list of completions in the address bar, and make it the first entry. I find this behavior very disruptive, since there are several sites that I don't care about visiting the root of, and I'd like Firefox to autocomplete the one path that I intentionally visited.

For example, I manually typed in the URL "escapistmagazine.com/v2/category/zero-punctuation/". The next time I tried to visit this page, I typed "esc" into the address bar, and the first autocomplete result was "https://www.escapistmagazine.com", which I had never visited.

It is impossible to remove this automatic suggestion from the list. Using Shift+Del will appear to remove the suggestion, but if I simply close that tab and open another one, it will reappear (without me even needing to visit the site again).

How can I prevent Firefox from automatically inserting this autocomplete result, or at least prevent it from always being the first suggestion?

Whenever I visit a website, even if I manually type in a full URL, Firefox will automatically add the root path of that website to the list of completions in the address bar, and make it the first entry. I find this behavior very disruptive, since there are several sites that I don't care about visiting the root of, and I'd like Firefox to autocomplete the one path that I intentionally visited. For example, I manually typed in the URL "escapistmagazine.com/v2/category/zero-punctuation/". The next time I tried to visit this page, I typed "esc" into the address bar, and the first autocomplete result was "https://www.escapistmagazine.com", which I had never visited. It is impossible to remove this automatic suggestion from the list. Using Shift+Del will appear to remove the suggestion, but if I simply close that tab and open another one, it will reappear (without me even needing to visit the site again). How can I prevent Firefox from automatically inserting this autocomplete result, or at least prevent it from always being the first suggestion?
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All Replies (1)

jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
  • Top 10 Contributor
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Hi Ciege, the in-URL-bar "autofill" feature is limited to top level site addresses. If that's annoying/unhelpful, you can turn it off so Firefox doesn't make a suggestion in the bar and you can choose from the drop-down instead. Here's how you can give that a try:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button accepting the risk.

(2) In the search box in the page, type or paste URLB and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the browser.urlbar.autoFill preference to switch the value from true to false

With that change, the top row will change from showing that Firefox will visit a site when you press Enter or click the Go button to showing that Firefox will search your input if you press Enter or click the Go button (unless it looks like an address, e.g., imdb.com).

More info on about:config: Configuration Editor for Firefox.