One easy, one not so easy.

Address Bar Search

The preference for address bar search is as follows:

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

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste keyw and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the keyword.enabled preference to switch the value from true to false

Visit / Search line

There is no unifiedcomplete switch for the new drop-down design in Firefox 48. You can use an add-on to tweak the bar. If you already use Classic Theme Restorer, that is one option. If not, I have a user style you could check out here:

https://userstyles.org/styles/122394/url-bar-tweaks-remove-visit-search-scroll-bar

You may need to re-enable fixup if that is still set to false.

Thanks! I just wish that when I update it would keep my preferences so I do not have to do this every time. The address bar should be an address bar. If I want to search I use a bookmark. Don't treat me like Microsoft and try and make the address bar do a zillion things. It should only do .com addresses.

You shouldn't lose the keyword.enabled preference during a normal update. What settings are you losing when you update?

As for what the address bar should do, you have a five-second fix. Don't ruin it for the rest of us.

I am not trying to ruin anything for anyone. All Mozilla needs to do is to ask on installation: "How do you want your address bar to function?" and then give us choices. We make our choices and then we never have to go to about:config. It is unreasonable for Mozilla to presume which choice people want to make. A good open source should give people clear choices and allow them to easily customize it the way they want. The five second fix took me over an hour to search for a solution, log in and wait for a response. I probably spent over an hour and a half between discovering the problem and finally getting a solution that worked. Give the user choices upon installation. This is the third time I have updated Firefox and had to deal with this problem and the solution has been different each time.

You can submit suggestions for changes to future versions of Firefox on the input site here:

https://input.mozilla.org/feedback/firefox

The keyword.enabled preference is an ancient setting that should never change on its own. Are you losing any other settings when you update?

I have another problem. I keep getting this message and Firefox slows down: "A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, open the script in the debugger, or let the script continue." I am getting this message repeatedly. What is the problem. I have no problem in Microsoft Office.

What address does the dialog list? For example:

• addresses starting with the name of the site usually are features/functions of the page
• addresses from other sites often (but not always) are advertising networks - using an ad blocking extension can help address issues with slow or dysfunctional ad network scripts
• addresses starting with chrome:// usually are part of Firefox or of an extension you installed - the Skype extension sometimes causes this problem, for example

We have a general support article addressing potential solutions to this issue: Warning Unresponsive script - What it means and how to fix it.

Another common cause of unresponsive script errors on Windows 7-10 is the protected mode feature of the Flash player plugin. That feature has security benefits, but seems to have serious compatibility issues on some systems. You can disable it using the Add-ons page. Either:

• Ctrl+Shift+a
• "3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons

In the left column, click Plugins. On the right side, find "Shockwave Flash" and click the More link. Then uncheck the box for "Enable Adobe Flash protected mode" and try that for a day to see whether it helps.