Jun 19, 2008
My Digital Life Editorial Team

Disable and Remove Bookmarks, Favorites, Pages in Tabs and Last Visited Sites from Firefox 3 URL Location Address Bar

Firefox 3 (FF3) incorporates a new and smart Location Bar (also known as URL address bar) which has intelligent learning feature while user using the Location Bar. Firefox 3 Location Bar AutoComplete function will automatically search for possible matching sites from browsing sites, typed URLs, tagged websites and bookmarked sites while user typing in term, and this mixture of website addresses also applied to the drop down list of Location Bar.

When click on the down arrow at the end of the Firefox 3 Location Bar, a drop down list is pulled out, showing a combination of URLs which made out of directly type website URL address, bookmarks (favorites), tagged sites, web pages opened in tabs, and last visited sites. Previously in Firefox 2 or earlier version, only URL locations which were directly typed into Location Bar will be remembered and shown in the drop down list.

To revert to old style and working format of Firefox 2 Location Bar where only typed URLs or location addresses is shown and displayed in Firefox 3 Location Bar, configure and set the matchOnlyTyped to True. To do so, type about:config in the Location Bar, confirm you know what you’re doing by clicking on I’ll be careful, I promise! button. Then locate browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped preference name. By default, it will has the value of “false”. Double click on the link to change the value to true. Now, only typed URL will be taken into consideration in Location Bar.

Firefox 3 Location Bar Match Only Typed URLs

Related posts:

  1. Remove and Delete Some URL Entries from Address Bar History of FireFox and Internet Explorer
  2. Edit Internet Explorer Typed URLs in Address Bar Dropdown List
  3. Disable FireFox Tabbed Browsing Scroll Arrows and Scrolling Tabs Feature
  4. Disable Firefox 3 Auto Save Tabs on Close to Prompt for Choice
  5. Change the Position of FireFox Tabs Close Button (or Revert Back to FireFox 1.5 Style at the End of Tab Strip)

10 Comments

  • the problem is when i used that browser, the history is now jumbled, and theirs no way for it to figure out how long ago you visited a site, so no way to display recently typed urls. the history is one big jumbled mess, everything is in one big result. so you can't type in an address, because it goes back so far how long ago you visited to show them. so the history's messed up. way to take history out of firefox 3. i won't be using it. firefox 3 sucks. you can disable showing typed urls though.

  • Me too!

    I have the same problem. Are the Mozilla guys f*^#in nuts?

    Anybody removed the bookmarks from the drop-down menu in address bar?

  • Me too. I have emptied the data files from tools, changed the value of "matchOnlyTyped"

    to True and I see no change what-so-ever, any help out there?

  • Same for me. I've cleared the history & it no longer appears, but I still get the bookmarks. Anybody not having this condition? Anybody try if 3.1 has this issue?

  • This doesn't work. I've changed the information, but it still shows my bookmarked sites when I start to type a URL. How do I stop it from doing this?

  • [...] When you start typing something into location bar, Firefox will try to guess where you want to go based on the visited history, then suggest the best match list and show it in the autocomplete drop-down menu. By default, it matches with what you have typed from below sources, as similar to Firefox 3.0: [...]

  • Go to about:config

    Alter the following…

    browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped; true

    browser.history_expire_days; 0

    browser.history_expire_days.mirror; 0

    Right click and delete "Most Visited" folder

    Restart Firefox

  • I did install oldbar, still when i enter one letter , for example "A", it is show me an address sites that have a letter even in the end. I hate it. I just want to show me in adress that only begins with A. Help!!!

  • [...] To do so, download and install oldbar add-on. Do take note that the extension only change the presentation of the URL address bar when showing Auto Complete matching results. The underlying AutoComplete algorithm is still the Firefox 3 algorithm, which matches also entries from bookmarks, tags, recently visited sites and directly typed into URL address bar items, unless user chooses to disable the inclusion of ‘rich’ results from AutoComple algorithm to just recently typed…. [...]

  • [...] typed URLs, and also bookmarks to its results listing (if you don’t like the mixture, you can disable inclusion of bookmarks and recently visited pages from Location Bar matching results.) Thus, the Smart Location Bar is radical departure from old Location Bar in Firefox 2 which only [...]

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