Category:Location Bar

Up to Firefox

The Location Bar, also known as the Address Bar or the URL Bar, is a text field in the browser window where URLs (“Web addresses” such as http://www.mozilla.org) and keyword searches are entered. In Firefox, it is at the top of the browser window to the left of the “Go” button.

Autocomplete

Addresses typed into the Location Bar are remembered and appear in a drop-down list below the bar as you type. In the Mozilla Suite, the autocomplete mechanism can be disabled by setting the preference browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled to false using about:config. In Firefox, this is not possible since autocomplete is an integral part of the History mechanism: its data is stored in the history.dat file, and persists for the same duration as history items. However, you can disable the display of autocomplete entries, and you can fully delete autocomplete entries manually, either one-by-one or all at once.

Searching

Text information entered in the Location Bar that doesn’t look like a URL is processed as an “Internet Keyword”. In Firefox, this means that you’re directed to Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” search. (More thorough searches can be performed using the Search Bar.)

In the Mozilla Suite, an option to search for your entered text appears at the bottom of the autocomplete dropdown as you type in the Location Bar.

You also have the option of creating keyword searches to use custom search engines when typing in the Location Bar.

Username/password syntax

When entering HTTP and FTP URLs, you can specify the HTTP Basic Auth or FTP username and password as follows:

http://username:password@example.com/
ftp://username:password@example.com/