Comments on: Fix Firefox 3’s location bar

By: Florin

Florin — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 16:56:27 +0000

I just disabled the dropdown menu from address bar like sprocket999 suggested. For me it was the best solution.

By: Fixit mann

Fixit mann — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:07:45 +0000

Upgrade to FF 3.5 it has a private browsing feature…
Also with a little work and some add-ons you can get it to look and work just like 2.0. (3.0 never did this as well.)

By: Fixit mann

Fixit mann — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:04:33 +0000

I’m not sure I understand this post, and it IS an older post, but have you tried “Prism” yet? That might be just what you’re looking for. It will open a single web page without ANY toolbars such as menus, buttons, URL bar (but you can set it to show what URL you’re on)
It did take me a couple tries to get it to work, but it’s very handy to open my email just to check for messages without the any toolbars.

By: Fixit mann

Fixit mann — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:59:01 +0000

Oh sorry I see this is an old post for 3.0x
The private browsing mode is in 3.5x

By: Fixit mann

Fixit mann — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:57:48 +0000

Have you tried “private browsing” mode?

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Private+Browsing

By: Shaun

Shaun — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:51:49 +0000

Unfortunately, that still doesn’t entirely solve the problems. Even if you have it set to just make suggestions from History, it pulls from my ENTIRE history, including sub-pages. This means that if I want to go to, say, CNN.com, and I type cnn, I get a list of all the pages I’ve visited on CNN from my history. Even worse, if I type CNN then ctrl-enter to add the www. and .com to the address, then Firefox seems to like to pick some random article I’ve visited instead of just doing what I want it to do and go to just plain old cnn.com.

By: Ferdinand

Ferdinand — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 05:42:22 +0000

There is a new privacy setting in Firefox 3.5. You can choose what to show in the location bar.
@rita: press F1 in Firefox and search

By: frank

frank — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 01:12:44 +0000

My history is still saved on my location bar even if i clear my private data, past websites like facebook, youtube and even porn sites can still be located from the location bar. I have tried to uninstalling mozilla firefox, and then reinstalling but it made no difference.

By: rita

rita — Thu, 28 May 2009 04:11:51 +0000

ok i love the new search section i now just have the one problem mine has vanished i have installed 9 diff versions to see if it will come back nothing helps any ideas please helppppppppppppp

By: Paul_Bags

Paul_Bags — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 05:34:53 +0000

The browser shouldn’t be learning what I do, the browser should behave predictably. Adaptive behaviour is not predictable behaviour to users, it is in fact an obstruction to use of a product.
How would you like it if I rearranged all your stuff in your house on a daily basis? AND stopped you from using anything until I was done? Thats the new location bar for you.

By: Paul_Bags

Paul_Bags — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 05:04:03 +0000

The perfect solution is not having some bloated useless crap search through lists in the background in my browser, causing it to hang so bad i can even look at another tab while I wait. Whats wrong with an address bar that I can type a URL into and press enter, none of this second guessing me, none of this searching through crap in the background?

By: John S

John S — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:33:02 +0000

I’m not a techie, just some guy that uses Firefox because it is better than IE. I really hate this new location bar. It not only clutters up my browser when I am tying in the address bar, it is a major privacy problem. I have the browser set to clear private data, but the crap in the location bar does not clear. I don’t want people snooping into my browsing!

By: Jean-Marc

Jean-Marc — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:57:53 +0000

Which FF version are you using? I’m not able to find places.frecency.bookmarks option into the 3.0.6 :(

I’ve reverted back to FF2 to pretty all of my stations except one to test it, I have have to admit that I’m very hapy with FF2. Way more than with FF3 :(

By: Another Disgruntled User

Another Disgruntled User — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 01:09:22 +0000

Changing places.frecency.bookmarks to 0 stops the Awfulbar from searching through bookmarks, which is a small step on the way to disabling it.

Setting browser.urlbar.search.chunkSize to 0 stops the Awfulbar from playing back bogus URLs, but it also means it won’t record recently-entered URLs, which I do want.

At the moment, I’d say turn the chunkSize to 1000, browse your preferred URLs by cut-and-paste into the URL bar, make sure you do so *in the correct order*, and visit those URLs multiple times. (Reload them all about half a dozen times). Then turn chunkSize back to 0, and while it won’t do the *right* thing, it’ll at least do the *wrong* thing less often.

Ugh. I avoided FF2 due to performance issues. I’m still seriously considering going back to FF1.54 over this. The awesomebar is the suck, and I refuse to embrace the suck. The only real solution is to have an about:config option to disable it completely.

By: FRANK VENTURA

FRANK VENTURA — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 04:58:04 +0000

I totally agree with the comments made. Why fix something that was not broken, did you ever heard “If ain’t broken don’t fix it” ? I dislike this “improvement”

By: wray

wray — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:23:16 +0000

How do i open a window now without the new feature location bar.

this is a security violation and a pain in the you know where.

we develop graphical and user apps where we don’t want a location bar. We want a deterministic inside window size for user input. We sometimes open a window as a help or dialog, returning a value and this just gets in the way.
Very annoying. With 7000 plus users complaining.

How does one ensure this is closed, when an app opens a window, other than testing if browser is firefox ABORT! Please use ie

Is there javascript we can use to close the thing.

Otherwise i am a fan of firefox.

A concerned developer

i avoided the upgrade from 2 until December because of this, now i am thinking of recommending or forcing the use of another browser.

By: MrCorey

MrCorey — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 14:06:00 +0000

I wish that were the only reason for me. I haven’t run FF3 final on a Windows system yet, but I find that the search takes FOREVER on the version that ships with Ubuntu. That drives me up the wall! There is no good reason why this should happen on my 2Ghz computer.

This “convenience” that’s supposed to make my life easier has lowered the quality of my computing experience significantly, as I use my computer mostly for browsing the web.

By: James

James — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:14:13 +0000

There are items that show up in my location bar in FF3 that WILL NOT GO AWAY NO MATTER WHAT I DO. Supposedly, the only items that do this are bookmarks. These items do indeed have the golden start next to them, but I have never bookmarked them, nor do they show up anywhere in my list of bookmarks.

I would love to see this rectified. Thanks.

By: TomH

TomH — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 15:06:53 +0000

Add my voice to those who hate the new location bar. Before we had a logical separation between addresses I entered, history, and bookmarks. Now they’re all jumbled together.

By: Bob the Chef

Bob the Chef — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:40:57 +0000

Y’all hate the new one just because your bookmarked porn shows up in the list whenever you type in an URL.

By: Patrick Bateman

Patrick Bateman — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:32:11 +0000

What is amazing is that the majority of complaints could be fixed very, very easily.

1. Include an option to match results by URL only (from left to right, ignoring “www.”) so that when I type “g…” it suggests “google.com” not “digg.com”. I find it staggering that people designing a web browser do not realise that this is how most people want to use the address bar.

2. Include an option to tell the bar what data it may use to build its list of suggestions, including the ability to remove bookmarks and to clear private data from the possible suggestions.

Both of these options should be trivial to add. Why not just do it and make people happy?

Like many others I am considering going back to FF2 at this stage.

By: abhi

abhi — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:44:31 +0000

Thats the crappiest address bar ever made !
Its extremely irritating. I tried messing with – about:config, but no use.
I uninstalled it and reinstalled 2.0.0.14, today it updated to 2.0.0.17.
I agree with –> yaRight

I dont know how mozilla guys thought of such crappy address bar, and implemented it. A big design flaw.

By: Jean-Marc

Jean-Marc — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 21:58:52 +0000

Hey dude, take a chill pill ;)

By: yaRight

yaRight — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:14:02 +0000

PS…..

My research finds that the URL change in FIREFOX 3, is the MOST HATED change. NOBODY I WORK WITH APPROVES IT IN ANY WAY!

I work with a lot of long time computer techs, coders, etc, who all have far more than 15 years full time computer work experience.

Shove this dumb idea out with all the ideas of the pass that went down too.

This oldbar script should be a patch to totally take out the extra trash, strickly be a recent history, no search or type anticipating bs.

We all hate how you type one letter, and the damn thing interupts you, then you have to click your mouse again to type the next letter, or you have fight the damn blinking of some trash to get your curser into place to type,,, FIREFOX SUCKS

Java hackers can steel your identity in firefox so EASY,,,,,,, too much BS in firefox, too flimsy, too open…

By: yaRight

yaRight — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:04:23 +0000

To hell with ALL adress bar searching, it leads to far to much intrusion ability, to much infection, to much risk at becoming a victim of hackers PISSANT PUNKS…

The URL bar should only hold the URL’s visited, nobody should risk the assult of invasionary attacks through useing it as a search tool leaving you open for stepping into a evil scripted site, JUST LIKE PREFETCH DOES….

TITLES PLUG UP the ease of seeing and grabbing a recent or regular site you go to.

PUNKS do not know anything about useing browsers, they only have a year or two at programing and use, thus they think OOHH THATS COOL LETS MAKE EVERYONE GET IT…

WELL F#$% YOU!

Take you damn punk ideas and shove up where the sun dont shine. If I wanted it I would ASK FOR IT,,,,
AND I DIDNT ASK FOR FIREFOXES BS IDEAS!!!!

Im tired of FIXING your mistakes, re-working your stupid coded ideas.

EXPLOITS DO NOT COME FROM A BASIC BROWSER! THEY COME FROM THE DUMB SHIT IDEAS YOU ADD IN THE CODE!

So, MOZILLA,,, EAT SHIT!