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How do I prevent Firefox from ignoring typed 'www.' in Location bar autocomplete suggestions?

  • 4 replies
  • 3 have this problem
  • 10 views
  • Last reply by jesteve

jesteve
jesteve
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I'm not sure when this change was implemented, however it appears that Firefox now ignores 'www.' when suggesting autocomplete entries. I'm a web developer that often switches between server tiers. So what I'm encountering is the following scenario. Assuming that my servers are:

www.server.com dev.server.com stage.server.com

If I type www.ser the first autocomplete option might be dev.server.com or stage.server.com.

I'm hoping there's an about:config option for this, but my google-fu is failing me. If there isn't I hope that one can be added because it can cause confusion as it's a fundamental change in the long-standing behavior of the Location bar.

Thanks! Jack

I'm not sure when this change was implemented, however it appears that Firefox now ignores 'www.' when suggesting autocomplete entries. I'm a web developer that often switches between server tiers. So what I'm encountering is the following scenario. Assuming that my servers are: www.server.com dev.server.com stage.server.com If I type www.ser the first autocomplete option might be dev.server.com or stage.server.com. I'm hoping there's an about:config option for this, but my google-fu is failing me. If there isn't I hope that one can be added because it can cause confusion as it's a fundamental change in the long-standing behavior of the Location bar. Thanks! Jack

All Replies (4)

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
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Does it help if you set the Boolean pref browser.urlbar.trimURLs to false on the about:config page to see the http: protocol?

jesteve
jesteve Question owner
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That appears to solve it, though based on the documentation of that function (everything I read said that it strips the protocol only). I'll continue to see if that does the trick.

dschweisguth
dschweisguth
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browser.urlbar.trimURLs = false does not solve the problem if you type more of the URL than just the hostname. For example, both www.fandor.com/blog and staging.fandor.com/blog are in my history. When I type "www.fandor.com/blog" in the location bar, "staging.fandor.com/blog" is always first in the autocomplete list, and the one I actually typed is somewhere farther down in the list.

Totally maddening. This behavior has sent me to the wrong site many times, and regularly causes me to curse foully.

jesteve
jesteve Question owner
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Agreed. Just happened that the couple times after attempting this about:config change didn't trigger the issue, but you are correct it is maddening and probably only an issue for developers like us. Glad to know I'm not the only one.

Best as I can tell it's prioritizing frequency of history visit over actual typed content. For developers that likely means that their Development and Stage environments are more likely to appear at the top than their Production server.