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Comment by hollerith | Hacker News Reader

what I've been doing for the last 3 or 5 years (in Firefox, which is the browser under discussion in this submission) is setting the following to false:

browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled

browser.urlbar.suggest.bookmark

browser.urlbar.suggest.history

it does not literally stop me from typing in for example "news.ycombinator.com", but it makes it so that I have to type every last one of those 20 characters, which leaves enough time between my (impulsive) decision to act and my (fast and nasty) reward to prevent most instances of procrastination.

(then I put frequently-accessed URLs that do not cause procrastination on the Bookmarks menu and the Bookmarks toolbar.)

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Great idea! I hadn't thought about the autocomplete feature making it easier to go to a website - but you're right! I'll try to a way to reduce it's effects in a future version.

I think it'd still be a good idea to leave auto-complete on for useful websites -- you've taken care of that by adding those sites to the bookmarks =)

before arriving at the above solution, I found a way to remove an URL from the list of candidates for autocompletion. the reason that did not solve my procrastination problem is that the next time I visited the URL, it was added back to the list of candidates.

If I had found a way to arrange for a URL to stay off the list of candidates (even after I visit the URL) I would have used that because, as you point out, it is a good idea to leave auto-completion on for useful web pages.

what about google's autocomplete? it's to search sites using google.

Firefox has a separate field for search queries that is in the nav bar like the location field (terminology? I mean where the URL goes) is (and like the back button, the refresh button, the "downloads" button, etc, are) but is not combined with the location field.

At least my Firefox does, and I don't think I customized that particular aspect of Firefox.

I seem to recall someone here saying that Firefox decided not to combine them (location and search fields) for privacy reasons. In particular, the user can be sure that anything typed into the location field is never sent to Google's autocompletion servers.

I could be wrong about the things I said in this comment, though.

Actually, since the latest nightly, they are combined, and you can turn search completion on or off

Is this going to be something that users can customise?

I'm not sure how this would pose a problem. I'm not the parent commenter, but I don't typically go to Google to search for sites I frequent. It would be such an odd thing to do—granted that I know the URL—that I would be forced to consider what I was doing even more vividly than if I had to type the URL out.

Unless you mean the search bar?

  browser.search.suggest.enabled = false

Or, if you mean that you'd like to have autocomplete on for searches, just leave the default:

  browser.search.suggest.enabled = true

This does not affect the URL bar.

Any idea on how to do this for chrome?

To answer my own question: it doesn't look like you can. But you can delete distracting websites from the omnibar on a one-by-one basis with Shift+Delete.

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