Changing autocomplete behavior - Firefox

The Location Bar, the Search Bar and some form fields on web pages have autocomplete dropdowns that appear with a list of previously-entered data. You can disable the display of autocomplete entries by editing your configuration files as described below.

Location Bar autocomplete is an integral part of the History mechanism and persists for the same duration as History items. In Firefox 2, the only way you can fully disable Location Bar autocomplete is by disabling History; this can be done by changing the Privacy setting, "Remember visited pages" to zero. Starting in Firefox 3, however, this only prevents additional history items from accumulating (bug 366075) and the Firefox 3 Location Bar ("Smart Location Bar") will still display bookmarks in the autocomplete drop down list, even if you clear the browsing history.

You can use these methods to modify or disable the display of autocomplete entires:

Preventing autocomplete display with UserChrome.css

Note that this method does not actually delete the internal lists of previously-entered data; it merely prevents their display. The method below has some problems. It will cause some errors appear in the JavaScript Console if you have chrome errors enabled, and in some circumstances it may cause the browser to malfunction.

In userChrome.css, add the following lines:

/* Remove autocomplete dropdown */
#PopupAutoComplete > .autocomplete-tree { display: none !important; }

If you also want to remove the dropdown button at the far right of the Location Bar, add the following line:

.autocomplete-history-dropmarker { display: none !important; }

You may also want to enable inline autocomplete.

Changing autocomplete behavior using about:config

To prevent entries from History or bookmarked items from appearing but show those that you have specifically typed into the Location Bar (url bar), use about:config to toggle browser.urlbar.matchonlytyped to true. To completely disable the Location Bar autocomplete function in Firefox 3, modify the preference browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 0 (zero). [1]

For additional information about modifying the "Smart Location Bar" behavior in Firefox 3, see the MozillaZine forum topic, Customising the Firefox 3 Location Bar and this forum post.

See also

• Deleting autocomplete entries

External links

• Smart Location Bar (Firefox Support)
• How to disable the Smart Location Bar (Firefox Support)
• How to disable Firefox 3's Smart Location Bar at bbayles.googlepages.com
• Extensions that modify the Firefox 3 Smart Location Bar behavior:
  • Hide Unvisited - This shows only URLs in your History
  • Awesome Options - This gives you many options to fine tune the Location Bar.
  • Old Location Bar - This returns the Location Bar to an almost Firefox 2 Behavior.