You can disable autofill in the address bar by changing browser.urlbar.autoFill to false in about:config and the default 1st action will be to search.

@zeronight,

Thanks for the suggestion. Changing browser.urlbar.autoFill to false definitely replaces the domain-only entry with search. But it also disables autofill for search keywords. For example, I have @wikipedia as a search keyword. Changing the setting at false, I have to type the entire @wikipedia, rather than just typing @wi the 'tab' key to finish.

I went through all the browser.urlbar.suggest.* options, and even the docs at https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/urlbar/preferences.html. It would be nice if there was setting something like browser.urlbar.suggest.domainOnly, but looks like no such setting. Maybe someday the Devs can add this.

FYI, I discovered another near-identical question at https://support.mozilla.org/mk/questions/1438472. Over there they refer to this as "base url", and also not able to find a way to only disable only this domainOnly suggestion.

I can't use your answer as "solved my problem", but I did give it a like.

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my question.

I just discovered something about the url bar behavior that gets me 99% of what I wanted.

I'm a touch-typist, and the reason I didn't like the first domain-only suggestion is I was picking up and moving my right hand all the way to the cursor key to press the down-arrow. But I accidentally discovered that hitting the tab key (much easier to reach) "skips over" the domain-only suggestion, to the next suggestion that I want.

So even though there is not a setting to eliminate the domain-only, reaching for the tab key to "skip over" is nearly as good.