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Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

Firefox did away with the search bar a long time ago. For a while, it was possible to bring it back through about:config, but I don't think it's possible to make the url bar a clean url bar anymore (this is an invitation for corrections). It's annoying because I navigate to pages via URLs, and all I don't want to send those to a search engine for "suggestions" (though, a locally-indexed history is nice). All too often, I'll type in a url and it will send that to a search engine, and then the page I wanted to go to is buried under ads. Useless. Especially now that Firefox is moving to paid ads in the "url" bar... blech.

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> Firefox did away with the search bar a long time ago. For a while, it was possible to bring it back through about:config

The search bar still exists in Firefox if you want it to btw. I use it daily.

My mistake, I meant to say url bar. Last time I tried this, the url bar had all the functionality of the search bar, which misses the point. Am I remembering wrong?

The settings screen has the option "show search in address bar results". You can turn that off.

It's the perfect setup really, you can turn it off, but if you want it you can type "? <search term>" into the address bar and it'll go to default search - or use one of your engine short codes as the first word "@google hackernews"

about:config -> keyword.enabled -> false (to stop sending possible search terms automatically to your default search engine, this includes when you type a URL firefox mistakes for a search term)

about:config -> browser.fixup.alternate.enabled -> false (to stop firefox trying a DNS lookup/connection with the term you typed with www. before, .com after)

This is something... but it isn't perfect. The address bar is still not purely an address bar. It still defaults to sending a query to a search engine (I like to use this to search for partial URL matches, for example, navigating git repos that I use frequently). That's what the search bar is for. Bah humbug. Even with all these options set, FF still encourages confusion between URLs and searching.

I'm not sure I understand.. there's an internal search (tabs, history, bookmarks) which sounds like what you're doing - there's no search engine used for this. Or do you mean the Search suggestions (Settings -> Search -> uncheck "Provide search suggestions" to disable, some of these suggestions are FF generated)

Interesting.

I didn't know you could add the search bar but when you do, the address bar still says "Search with <your default search> or enter address".

Also see sibling. I use Firefox daily and I have both a search bar that I use when I really want to search and I also don't see any "Search" stuff in my address bar. When I type "n" I can hit enter because it finds news.ycombinator.com in my history. All the next results are other things from my history which have an n in it.

I have browser.urlbar.showSearchSuggestionsFirst=false

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