Yes, disable remember history.

Hi Pkshadow - OK, disabling remember history would be a blunt force approach, but that's what my mother would have called 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater'!

I don't want to disable history, because I still want access to the history when I go to the History tab. I just don't want to see history items as suggestions in a drop-down box whenever I type in the search bar.

It's quite simple really - the address bar behaves correctly when used as a search bar - there's no drop-down box when suggestions are disabled, but the history is still there under the History tab. The search bar doesn't behave in this way, which is probably an oversight, not a feature.

Perhaps I should be reporting this as a bug rather than looking for help on a forum!

Hello Blacknest,

Would you try this please :

3-bar menu (or 'Tools') => Options => Privacy & Security

Under ' Address Bar' => 'When using the address bar, suggest' :

uncheck 'Browsing history'

That should do the trick .....

Hi McCoy,

Actually, it doesn't do the trick! If you look at the about:config screenshot with the original post, you'll see that the two items starting 'browser.urlbar.suggest.history...' are marked as 'false'.

This shows that I had already done what you are suggesting before I made the original post. Indeed, that is why I included the screenshot - so that nobody need waste their time making that suggestion.

Blacknest said

Hi McCoy, Actually, it doesn't do the trick! If you look at the about:config screenshot with the original post, you'll see that the two items starting 'browser.urlbar.suggest.history...' are marked as 'false'. This shows that I had already done what you are suggesting before I made the original post. Indeed, that is why I included the screenshot - so that nobody need waste their time making that suggestion.

I missed that - I apologize ......

Blacknest said

If you look at the about:config screenshot with the original post, you'll see that the two items starting 'browser.urlbar.suggest.history...' are marked as 'false'.

Just to make sure : After you changed the values of those two prefs : did you then close and restart Firefox, in order for the change(s) to take effect  ?

'Giving it one more shot :

Would you please take a look at this article, and scroll down to the section :

Turning off the web search in the address bar

Hi McCoy - yes, I closed Firefox and restarted it many times... actually, I spent a couple of hours late last night searching the web and reading any articles I could find, before I posted my question on this site.

As far as about:config settings are concerned, I didn't actually change any of them directly - I selected options in the Options->Search and Options->Privacy&Security pages (which work immediately), and then checked on about:config to see what changes appeared in the config list.

I had seen the article you mentioned, and I read it again just now, but I couldn't find anything new that I haven't already tried. It's worth mentioning that this is an issue with search history rather than Autocompletion or Domain Guessing , since what appears in the drop-down box is a list of things I have typed into the search box (even single letters), rather than successful searches or domain names.

Anyway, many thanks for your persistence! This isn't a big problem - just an annoyance that I couldn't get to the bottom of.

I have to say that my gut feeling about this (based on 35+ years dealing with software development teams) is that it looks like an unintentional omission. The give-away would be that there are no entries listed in the config table for browser.searchbar - there's one for browser.search and lots for browser.urlbar - which suggests that the search bar should follow the preferences of the address bar, which it does mostly - though not completely.