New "Feature" In Firefox Driving Me INSANE

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Gawd
Joined
Mar 30, 2006
Messages
917
I'm about to give up on FF and go back to IE. They have ruined the new Firefox for me with the changes to the address bar.

The way it used to work was the address bar would remember what you typed, and suggest what you've typed before as autocompletes for what you're typing now.

The way it works now, the address bar is aware of your entire browsing history, and all your bookmarks. So if you're just trying to get to the front page of a site by typing the domain, you're shit out of luck.. most of the time you will not be offered the front page as an autocomplete... how fucking stupid is that? Ie if I type "www.goo" instead of offering me "www.google.com" as an autocomplete, it will have my last search string or results URL on it... so fucking stupid and annoying.

You're supposed to be able to turn this off by going to about:config and changing browser.urlbar.RememberOnlyTyped to True, but it doesn't work. The address bar remembers every link you've ever clicked and it remembers it FOREVER. From what I can see the only way to delete it is to go in manually to the Firefox folder and delete files from my profile. Which files, I don't know, and I'll probably just go back to IE before trying to figure it out.

I've got a couple addresses that keep popping up and it's driving me NUTS, because I'm trying to go to the front page of these sites and the autocomplete takes me deep into the site to some page I visited like five days ago, what's worse there is an anchor in the URL so it takes me to the middle of a page with hundreds of comments on it. No matter what I try, I cannot get this address to stop coming up. Clear Private data doesn't work. I've tried a million different commands in about:config. At this point no matter what I type in the address bar "Bizarre Underground Explosion In Russia" comes up as the autocomplete. It's driving me MENTAL.

FUCK YOU FIREFOX. YOU LASTED FOUR YEARS BEFORE BECOMING BLOATED AND USELESS.
 
the way it works is if you goto www.google.com the most frequently it will be the top most auto complete I find that if I just goto google a few times it becomes the top most option should it fall out of favor for multiple views of the alternatives.

it might take you about 3 maybe 5 times of typing in goo and finding it in the list and clicking on it til it's the top pick
 
yeah thats pretty annoying, ive noticed it as well. everytime I try to goto wiki I goto some article I dont need to see again, and of course everytime you go there by accident it makes it more likely to go there again. Neat! :(

lets make it "easier" for people by annoying the shit out of them.
This is an exclusive Microsoft mantra, I thought.
 
I play www.Darkthrone.com and the FF auto complete on popularity can be rather useful. it's also rather useful for the [H]forum since I mostly go directly to Usercp instead of the front page of [H]forum. when I visit the site for the first time of the day or what have you to check msgs and such.

I agree though in a search environment like google or wiki it can be a pain. just make sure you don't view your searches more than once.
 
I don't like that in FF3 either. IE8 beta has a similarly obnoxious feature. Bleh.
 
Cluttered Firefox address bar history.

When you start typing into the address bar - you can use Ctrl+L as a shortcut to get there - the address bar history drop down menu becomes visible if what you've typed matches one or more entries.

As soon as the entry or entries you want to delete become visible press the down arrow on the keyboard. The first entry in Firefox's address bar history will be selected. You can now use the down and up arrows to navigate all entries matching what you originally typed in the address bar.

When an entry you want to delete is selected press the Del button to delete it. The history drop down stays open so you can keep deleting until all items are gone.

If you press Ctrl+L - select the current address in the address bar - press backspace followed by the down arrow you get the complete address bar history. Again you can delete items with the Del button.

Firefox will visit the selected address if you press the Enter key instead of the Del key.
 
The new address bar is fantastic. From what I've seen, the only people that don't like it is because of one of two things. Privacy and people who use the address as a bookmarking system.

Privacy I can understand but there are "private browsing mode" extensions that you can use to keep your naughty sites away from the history bar.

Second, people tend to try to go to their frequently visited sites through the address bar. HELLO?! That's what bookmarks are for! If it's a site that you visit so often, don't rely on autocomplete to get to the site, use bookmarks and bookmark keywords!



by the way, the about:config entry to modify is
browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped
not
browser.urlbar.RememberOnlyTyped


also, another thing to realize is.. almost EVERY major browser is implementing their own version of this. So yeah, you can either go back to an old browser with possible exploits or just deal with it because this feature is here to stay.
 
Luda said:
The new address bar is fantastic. From what I've seen, the only people that don't like it is because of one of two things. Privacy and people who use the address as a bookmarking system.
Click to expand...
Those are my complaints. :p Who would expect to use the address bar drop down history to actually visit recent site(s)? Craziness!

All I need an address bar to do is hold the history *I* entered and not get in the way by *guessing* what I want (the guessing gives priority to poor results most of the time, even after fixing it dozens of times).

The address bar in IE7 is excellent. It logically autocompletes URLs I visited before, the drop-down shows entries *I* typed and indexes my bookmarked sites without polluting the drop down. The "enhancements" made by MS, Google and Mozilla simply make it much worse.
 
Using delete on the drop-down list doesn't get rid of anything. It will delete it for that type-in, but the next time you type in an address, the autocomplete list will show the entry you just "deleted".
 
K, fixed it. in about:config, do the following settings:

browser.urlbar.matchBehavior 0
browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped true
browser.urlbar.maxRichResults 0

Firefox 3.01 address bar now works as it did in 2.0

The reason I often type addresses into the address bar is that when I'm typing into a box on one page and then want to quickly navigate somewhere else, I use keyboard shortcuts. CTRL+T CTRL+L then type the first 2 or 3 letters of the domain name and hit Enter is way faster than moving your hand from the keyboard to the mouse and then moving the mouse cursor to the correct bookmark or link.
 
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