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Firefox 3

Disable Firefox 3 AwesomeBar

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 12:34 pm by Kenny

I just downloaded FireFox 3 and I'm pretty happy with it. It's fast and works well. The AwesomeBar is a cool feature, but I generally don't like auto-complete (EDIT: for bookmarks or previously typed-in URLs) in a browser, so having it search my entire bookmarks and list all the possible matches is something I wanted to disable. If you're annoyed by the Firefox 3 AwesomeBar (or SmartBar or whatever it's called) like I am, there's an easy way to display it.

Warning: if you are unfamiliar with FireFox's about:config settings, be VERY careful following these steps as you could hose your browser.

  • In the address field, type "about:config", without the quotes, and hit enter
  • In the filter field, type "browser.urlbar", also without the quotes, and hit enter
  • Double-click on the line with browser.urlbar.matchBehavior, change the value in the popup to 0, and click OK
  • Double-click on the line with browser.urlbar.maxRichResults, change the value in the popup to 0, and click OK
  • Now restart FireFox and enjoy!

EDIT: I should clarify that my intent is to COMPLETELY disable the AwesomeBar, not turn it into the old type-in-address-only-matching address bar from FireFox 2.


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Posted in Mac |

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6 Responses to “Disable Firefox 3 AwesomeBar”

  1. Bob-o - Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 1:11 am :

    Problem with doing this is it disables matching completely. Anyone found a way to do URL matching only like it was in 2.0?

  2. Rudio - Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 5:17 am :

    Yeah, this tip doesn't work right!

  3. Gigabyte77 - Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 6:50 am :

    All you need to change to match only on websites and not bookmarks is to go into about:config and set the following to true:

    browser.urlbar.matchOnlytyped

  4. Kenny - Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 8:08 am :

    It does work as specified. I wanted to disable it completely, not just change its functionality. However, the browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped tip from Gigabyte77 is a good one if you only want it to behave like FF2. Thanks!

  5. Taoh Rihze - Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 6:20 am :

    THANK YOU!!! after having been through 10 howto's as this feature has changed. I finaly found a methode that DO work with the 3.0.1 version

  6. Kitsuner - Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 9:54 am :

    All right, I understand the Awesomebar disabling part, but Gigabyte's tip about matchOnlytyped doesn't seem to work quite right. Is that supposed to be in addition to or instead of your suggested adjustments, or possibly some weird combination thereof? I've toyed around with different variations, but I still can't seem to set it to anything besides Awesomebar: ON or Matching: OFF.

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