Hi lwcr,

Here's what you need to do in order to turn autocomplete off:

1. In your location bar, type about:config. (you might see a warning message - just keep going)
2. In the search bar at the top of the screen, type browser.urlbar.auto
3. You should see browser.urlbar.autofill, browser.urlbar.autoFill.typed and browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled near the top of the list. In the right-most column, it should say "True"
4. Double click on each one to make them "False"
5. Restart Firefox.

Hope that does the trick!

Jayelbe

Thanks for trying Jayelbe, but FF still puts "http://" in front of and "/" behind anything that I type into the location bar even after those changes.

You will always need a protocol to access a website (http://, ftp://) or local file (file://) and a default http will be added when you do not type it. A trailing slash may get added if you do not provide a file name and file extension. Firefox hides the http protocol by default (pref: browser.urlbar.trimURLs).

Dear Cor-el,

I want a browser without training wheels .... please. If you are less than 45 years old, then I was programming computers before you were born --- in assembly language. What I want is to be able to supply an access protocol as and where needed as I see fit - i.e., I want FF to do is absolutely NOTHING.

Think "command line" - if what I type is wrong then it FAILS ....and maybe I get a useful error message and maybe not. And this is not only OK but it useful and wanted by a technically proficient segment of FF's user base.

Please pardon me, but if you are a logician or programmer or Buddist then you realize that the NULL set is an absolutely valid answer and that it might well be the very answer that I am looking for. If I execute a Boolean conjunctive query what I DO NOT WANT is a bunch of crap-ola served up to me by Google/Microsoft/whoever it is that feels absolutely compelled to return something and/or anything because I /might be a newbe-might be turned off -might not buy their product/ .

On Linux you also have autocomplete possibilities with using the tab key to autocomplete file names. There is a difference between using a simple command line and a more versatile command line that includes search capabilities like the location bar in Firefox. Other browser like Google Chrome go much further and do not have a search bar.

Setting the above mentioned autocomplete prefs and the keyword.enabled pref to false should work for most cases. You can also look at the browser.fixup.* prefs.

See:

• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Location+bar+search

You can look at this file to see how it works:

• http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-release/source/docshell/base/nsDefaultURIFixup.cpp