Thank you for the clarification. I do indeed have Tab Utilities (1.6pre5) installed.

I'm not sure that the proper answer to the question of "why can't firefox do a search on a single word entered in the address bar" is to blame your DNS-lookup provider. Yes, I use OpenDNS, and yes, they return stupid advertising pages when my browser attempts to go to a non-existent URL. HOWEVER: both old (v. 12 and below) and new Opera, as well as Chrome, are smart enough to figure out that when I enter a single word into the omnibar, I WANT TO SEARCH IT. Obviously, there's some sort of rules-based parsing going on here. Why would that be too difficult for Firefox to implement? It seems rather Pollyanna-ish to just say "Gosh! I have no idea if that's a valid domain or a search keyword! Here, let me try a DNS-lookup on it!", especially when you consider that the majority of DNS providers "do the wrong thing". Seems more like a failure of design on Firefox's part, to me.

You can set the keyword.enabled pref to false to disable the search and use a one letter keyword search if you want to do a search via the location bar. This will still not work properly in case your ISP or DNS service does an automatic redirect, but allows to do single word searches more reliably.

See above: "Yes, I use OpenDNS, and yes, they return stupid advertising pages when my browser attempts to go to a non-existent URL."

Hi bookraiders, you can file a request for enhancement bug at the following site:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

Is the proposed change as simple as "if there is no period, skip the DNS lookup"?

In that case, there would be a change for local addresses (e.g., http://intranet/): users would need to type the protocol to bypass search. This might be acceptable to business users because after the first access, the autocomplete drop-down and autofill features would make future accesses easier.

That does seem like a good solution, especially if "localhost" were to be included among the keywords that wouldn't trigger a search.