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How to remove hidden/redirected URLs from AwesomeBar results?

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  • 2 have this problem
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  • Last reply by backy0175

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I like my location bar autosuggest to show my history for only a small number of URLs. Frecency works fairly well at putting the best results toward the top, but I'd prefer not to see some results at all. I'm not looking for private browsing mode or anything, I just like the results to be clean. Yes, I realize most folks aren't like this. ;)

  • In about:config, I have browser.urlbar.autoFill set to False so URL autocomplete doesn't kick in.
  • For random pages I visit, Shift+DEL in the location bar removes these from the history (and the places.sqlite tables) completely.
  • URLs that redirect appear in AwesomeBar results. I think this behavior began in Firefox 14 (when browser.urlbar.autoFill reappeared) but I'm not 100% sure.


Is there an easy way to prevent URLs with non-visible transitions (moz_places.hidden=1) from displaying in AwesomeBar results?

Can I prevent hidden URLs from getting stored in moz_places? If not, is there an extension that removes them or is there any harm in going into places.sqlite and manually removing them like so:

DELETE FROM moz_places WHERE hidden=1 AND frecency <> 0

I like my location bar autosuggest to show my history for only a small number of URLs. Frecency works fairly well at putting the best results toward the top, but I'd prefer not to see some results at all. I'm not looking for private browsing mode or anything, I just like the results to be clean. Yes, I realize most folks aren't like this. ;) * In about:config, I have browser.urlbar.autoFill set to False so URL autocomplete doesn't kick in. * For random pages I visit, Shift+DEL in the location bar removes these from the history (and the places.sqlite tables) completely. * URLs that redirect appear in AwesomeBar results. I think this behavior began in Firefox 14 (when browser.urlbar.autoFill reappeared) but I'm not 100% sure. Is there an easy way to prevent URLs with non-visible transitions (moz_places.hidden=1) from displaying in AwesomeBar results? Can I prevent hidden URLs from getting stored in moz_places? If not, is there an extension that removes them or is there any harm in going into places.sqlite and manually removing them like so: DELETE FROM moz_places WHERE hidden=1 AND frecency <> 0

Modified by stoub

All Replies (2)

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(1) I don't know why hidden pages would be in the autosuggest list. Maybe there's a bug on that already?

(2) I don't think there is any harm removing history items through the UI, but I'm not sure about deleting directly from that table because I don't know whether your SQLite utility takes care of related cleanups. When I delete a record from moz_places in SQLite manager, either by right-clicking and choosing delete or using a DELETE query, the corresponding record(s) in moz_historyvisits which store a foreign key to moz_places are not removed. Might this create some errors down the road? Or might there be a simple cleanup for those records?

Maybe you could create a "smart folder" that displays the correct records, but lets you delete them through the UI. When I deleted a page from the Most Visited smart folder, it removed the place from moz_places and the several hundred records in moz_historyvisits (which explains why the operation takes a while).

This thread has a link to some resources on the query language and a methodology for creating the smart folder: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/934205

Actually, when I review the MDN article, you can includeHidden, but I don't see a way to limit the results to hidden places.

Hmmm... perhaps a workaround for that is to run an UPDATE query in your SQLite editor to insert a marker into the title and use that to build your smart folder?

I'll be interested to see what you come up with.

If there is an add-on for this, I'm not aware of it.

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Hi. stoub.

I'm trying to create addon that remove url from AwesomeBar results.

In my hacking, moz_places.hidden = 1 is no effect to remove from results. and, moz_places.hidden is cleared to zero when visit that url.