Browser.urlbar.matchOnWordBoundary

From MozillaZine Knowledge Base

The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. The correct title is browser.urlbar.matchOnWordBoundary.

This article describes the preference browser.urlbar.matchOnWordBoundary. To add, delete, or modify this preference, you will need to edit your configuration — do not edit this article.

1 Background
2 Possible values and their effects
- 2.1 True
- 2.2 False
3 First checked in
4 Has an effect in
5 Related bugs
6 Related preferences

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Background

In Firefox 3, the Location Bar received a number of improvements. Among those improvements was the move to a XUL richlistbox widget for the auto-complete dropdown. This allowed styled URL/title information, favicons, and highlighted match information. Typing in the Location Bar will now search not only URLs, but page titles, bookmark names, and tags.

Due to the amount of information available when searching those sources, it’s easy to come across cases where typed text will match useless items (e.g., typing “ebay” might bring up a match for “thepiratebay”). To address this, word boundaries are taken into account when searching for matches, making text that matches against the start of a word rank higher than text matching inside a word (e.g., “eb” matching “ebay” over “website”).

This preference determined whether or not to use word boundaries when searching for items in the Location Bar. It has since been obsoleted by browser.urlbar.matchBehavior.

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