The address bar has a lot of individual preferences, and sometimes the interplay of them can be difficult to sort out. By default, Firefox will try to search for entries like ''curiosity'' and ''ecerts-dev'' in your default search engine if there is no match using autofill. Firefox does the search first, and in the background checks DNS. If the host name is discovered it then shows a bar asking whether you wanted to access that server and it remembers your action on that question for future accesses. If you have set '''keyword.enabled''' to false, then Firefox may fall back to "fixup" of the kind you described. To force Firefox to check DNS first, you could try this (I can't tell if it makes a difference because I have very few servers to test and I've used them all before...): (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 '''fix''' and pause while the list is filtered (3) Double-click the '''browser.fixup.dns_first_for_single_words''' to switch its value from false to true Does that help?