Deactivating the Firefox 3 awesome bar

A few weeks ago I wrote how pleased I was with the latest release of Firefox, noting the new awesome address bar that provides website suggestions to you based on letters, numbers and words as well as URLs you start to type. I have been making good use of this feature, now only having to type an ‘a’ in to pull up ‘http://www.google.com/analytics’ and a ‘h’ to visit ‘http://www.hittail.com’. Just think of all the damage I am saving my keyboard from!

It would appear however that there are Firefox users who are not so pleased with the new awesome address bar and would like to disable it. I took a quick look through the Tools > Options panel and to my surprise I could not find a checkbox to enable/disable it. I guess Mozilla just presumed everyone would love it – not such a smart move by a company who champion freedom.

I did a bit of digging and eventually found a knowledge base item on the Firefox support site that does explain how to disable the awesome bar.

There are two options: an extension and a slightly more geeky configuration tweak. I have not tested the extension, but I did give the config a tweak to see what the result was as I had a hunch that even traditional site suggestions would be lost – you know, by starting with a ‘www.’ you’d see a list of all sites beginning with ‘http://www.’ – and I believe my hunch was right. When I restated Firefox and entered a new address, no suggestions appeared. After actually visiting the site I tried it again and still no suggestions were offered.

Poor form!

I can only assume that at some point Mozilla will release a Firefox update that will include the ability to switch off awesome suggestions, but until then I guess if you don’t like the feature it’s just a case of learn to love it, struggle on, hack it… or use IE.