How to Disable Smart Location Bar in Firefox 3

After days of tweaking my new Firefox 3.0, I found out that one so-called top new features of Firefox is not so pleasing  Smart Location Bar or the Awesome Bar.

The Smart Location Bar is just too “smart” to an extent that it saves my viewed browsing history without my knowledge! The auto complete feature is fine with me but I would still prefer the old Firefox 2.0 way in handling my addresses. I tried to disable this “smart” option via the Option menu but there is no direct way to do it. So, I have to do it the indirect way via about:config or with a help of an extension.

OK, here is how:

Remove only bookmarks results from the list

To to this, you can just use Hide Unvisited extension to get the job done. What Hide Unvisited does is hide bookmarks that you haven’t visited from showing in the Awesome Bar.

Completely disable the Smart Location Bar (Disable auto complete list)

You need to do it via about:config. This is how I do it:

1. Go to the about:config page via the location bar by typing about:config and hit enter. You will get a warning message like the one below, just untick “Show this warning next time” and click “I’ll be careful, I promise!” to proceed.

2. Search for browser.url (using the Filter) and you will see these two preferences browser.urlbar.matchBehavior and browser.urlbar.maxRichResults. Set both preferences value to -1 by double clicking on it.

3. You are done!

Now exit and restart your Firefox and you’ll get back you old address bar!

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Tags: bookmark, Browser, browsing, complete list, Completely, config, Firefox, firefox 3, firefox 3.0, howto, knowledge, matchBehavior, remove, tweak, tweaking

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 3:45 am and is filed under Firefox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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