What does this mean? It sounds like a rephrasing of an antifeature, something like "NEW: Everything you type in the location field is now immediately sent to your search provider, just like in Chrome, making the distinction between the location field and search field pointless."
Maybe they changed it from the beta where I used it, but it was awful in a completely different way. It very highly preferred doing searches or visiting the top level of a domain to your bookmarks and history.
So, for example, typing "trans" brings up page title "Transmission" at 192.168.1.17, which is a page I visit several times a week, under the old Firefox. On the new Firefox, it brought up "Search {default search engine} for Transmission". If I just did "trans", again, instead of preferring "Transmission", it preferred Google Translate, which I visited once, six months ago, apparently because the URl begins with "translate.google.com"
As someone who has basically adapted with the AwesomeBar, I was previously hitting Ctrl + L, typing one or two letters, hitting tab, enter, DONE, and it worked for any website I visit. With the change it was always at least two tabs instead of one and sometimes more, or it just straight up required more typing.
Fortunately it could be turned off in about:config. If someone with the release version can provide any input on whether it's different than beta, that'd be nice. It honestly enraged me so much I don't even want to look. I was the guy that was telling people to move along with the less popular changes; I guess that was the one that did me in too. Made me think about downloading the long-term support release.
What is the name of this setting?
I forget exactly when keywords came out but its been bloody ages.
E:
I hate being post rate limited..
"TIL" in response to ptx. I've actually never bothered with the search bar so was unaware of that behavior.
The navigation bar only searches locally (the history and bookmarks on your disk) and doesn't send anything anywhere until you press enter.
I was under the impression that this was considered a feature and the reason for keeping both fields even though they could easily have been unified long ago.