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Comment by osamagirl69 | Hacker News Reader

Tangential -- but my biggest pet peeve with firefox is its autocomplete behavior in the address bar. It seems to be impossible to prevent it from putting website.com before website.com/page_I_actally_want

The specific case I have: I use the URL bar basically as my bookmarks (turned off browsing history and top sites in address bar suggestions), and one of the pages I frequency is https://hackaday.com/blog/ (note that this is distinct from the base https://hackaday.com). In chrome it works fine, if I hit h in the address bar it immediately autocompletes it to the full url, but in firefox it autocompletes it to the base url so I have to hit h then down arrow to get to the site I want.

For the life of me I haven't been able to figure out a way to change the behavior, and it absolutely infuriates me that there is no obvious way to fix it.

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I have the exact opposite wish most of the time, in Safari for instance, it's almost impossible to go to https://example.com/blog when you've previously gone to https://example.com/blog/2022/01/01/my-article.html. In FF I like how it autocompletes with letter + right-arrow + letter + right-arrow. This way I can quickly go to different subreddits by just typeing r -> r -> f -> n for reddit.com/r/formula1/new and other subreddits using other first letters.

I had the exact same problem! There is no configuration option to change this, and I literally kept using Chromium based browsers for years because of this.

This workaround isn't perfect, but it has allowed me to switch:

  - Bookmark the url
  - Go to Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks > [location of your bookmark]
  - In the keywords section, put the first two or three characters (I settled on three) of the domain, so 'hac' in this case

Now when you start typing in the domain and you type those first two or three characters (or however many you want to setup), the first suggestion from firefox will be your keyworded bookmark and you can just hit enter instead of having to hit down!

Crazy how Firefox always defaults to the domain instead of the most frequently visited URL for the characters typed in, but this has worked for me.

This is intriguing -- can you explain your preference setup a bit more to get this behavior?

I was not able to get this to work on my setup. I added a keyword 'uniquekeyword' to the hackaday bookmark, but if I start typing uni... it just tries to give me a web search. I tried enabling/disabling the search bar and messing with my address bar preferences but no dice.

Counter-intuitively, it does sort of work if I put the keyword as a tag. It still tries to offer me a search as the top hit, but the tag result is the second hit.

Hmm, not sure what else you would need.

When searching for a setting to make Firefox work like Chrome, I had found this a while back: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1223611

I basically did what was suggested there. (The 2-3 character length I suggested was just from my experience of avoiding collisions with other urls I might visit and was when I wanted to hit return when I started typing.)

Not sure if these settings matter or not. I just tried disabling a few and it doesn't seem to make a difference These are the only ones that seem relevant.

In about:preferences#search I have this enabled:

  -  Provide search suggestions
  -  Show search suggestions in address bar results

In about:preferences#privacy I have this enabled (plus a few other things):

  -  Bookmarks

Thanks so much for this. I confirmed that this works on a virgin firefox install, and was able to get it working on my config after messing with the search settings to enable search suggestions.

The key here is that if firefox sees an exact match to a bookmark keyword, it will put that as the top hit on the address bar. So if you put a short keyword for your bookmark (in this case, ha for the aforementioned hackaday example) you can type in h a {enter} and it will take you to the full url of the bookmark instead of the base.

For me it's the opposite. Chrome's insistence to not give you the result you want from your history (because it want's you to do a Google search) is infuriating.

Glad to see I’m Not the only one. One of my few complaints with FF.

Have you tried typing "blog" or "hack blog"?

This is actually the root of the problem, the address bar behavior in my firefox config always gives me the first hit as one of 2 options:

1. Base url of a website (in my case, it only searches bookmarks, but if you enable search history it will match to base url of historical searches as well)

2. If it can't find a match, then it defaults to a web search

What I want is for it to match full url's from either the history or bookmarks, but this does not seem to be an option

Does using search qualifiers help: * # ^ etc.

For me, it often insists on correcting internal-service.initech.corp:5010/dashboard to internal-service.initech.corp:5020/dashboard.

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