How to turn off text suggestions?
Whenever I start typing something FF 4.0.1 is displaying everything I have ever entered on the same website in same window if it contains the text fragment just typed, which is nice in adress bar but incredibly annoying everywhere else. How can I turn it off? Clearing cache every time is out of the question and unchecking "Search for text when I start typing" in general advanced options didn't help.
All Replies (2)
To remove use of the AwesomeBar, use ...
Tools > Options > Privacy > When using the location bar, suggest: Nothing
How the AwesomeBar works
The "AwesomeBar" (Location Bar Autocomplete) is a very valuable tool that was introduced in Firefox 3. It is a usage based report based on your usage history and bookmarks completely based on information strictly local to your machine. The idea is that you can type strings of characters with the strings in any order and Firefox will produce the list before/until you press Enter. Search engines use word to find sites, the AwesomeBar works strictly from character strings.
The "Awesomebar" works well, but the thing that is wrong with it is that it:
- two line (plus separator) is very distracting and a waste of space
- does not return enough hits to be useful
Those two items can be rectified with extensions
- oldbar :: Add-ons for Firefox
Changes listing from two line entry to single line entries, minimizing distracting multiplle fontsizes and colors
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/oldbar/ - Locationbar Limit :: Add-ons for Firefox
My choice on options: 30 hits visible, 80 hits scrollable
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/locationbar-limit/
For instance, I could find the two links above by typing
- oldbar
- location bar limit
into the location bar without regard for word boundaries, in the case of the second search. I could have typed addons loc bar as it looks into url and titles.
As you type the hits get narrowed down and the fact that page is bookmarked (bookmark star) is what I most tend to look for.
For help working with your bookmarks and history see
- Bookmarks - MozillaZine Knowledge Base -- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Bookmarks
- Sorting and rearranging bookmarks - Firefox - MozillaZine Knowledge Base
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Sorting_and_rearranging_bookmarks_-_Firefox - Viewing the browsing history - Firefox - MozillaZine Knowledge Base
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Viewing_the_browsing_history_-_Firefoxfox
It takes about three weeks of usage for the AwesomeBar to work well, during that time you can elevate something by pasting the url into the location bar and entering it three times (typed has a high rank), you can demote something by selecting it and using the "Del" key which will only affect history not bookmark components.
See:
- Tools > Options > Privacy > History: "Remember search and form history"