4 February 2009 - 7:19Firefox 3.5 Location Bar Preferences
For those comfortable with twiddling around with about:config, there are several new preferences to play with since Firefox 3. (If that sounds scary, check out my other post about Firefox 3.5 Location Bar Privacy.)
I’ll explain three new groups of preferences that let you..
- Toggle suggestions on and off
- Customize what results get shown
- Change the matching behavior as you type
Configure Smart Location Bar's behavior from about:config
Toggle Suggestions
The first preference is fairly simple; toggle browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled to turn the location bar suggestions on and off. This is useful if you always want to type out the URLs you want, or if you can type a whole domain and hit enter faster than typing a single letter and having Firefox suggest the site you want.
If you’re just looking to prevent certain pages from showing up in the suggestions, there are better options available than using this sledgehammer (see below). Also, for those who have set browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 0, -1 or something else (e.g., userChrome.css) to turn off suggestions, using this preference is better as it prevents your CPU from wasting power while searching for results that Firefox won’t show.
Customize Results
The second preference lets you make the location bar only match URLs of pages you’ve visited, similar to Firefox 2’s behavior. It’s much more powerful than just that as it also lets you restrict results to pages that you’ve 1) visited, 2) bookmarked, 3) tagged or 4) typed in addition to letting you force your search terms to match in 1) the title or 2) the URL.
You can use any combination of these filters to reduce the number of results that show up in the location bar’s suggestions. Another way to look at it is if you specify some filters, e.g., bookmarked + typed, you’re getting rid of anything that isn’t that — throw away all results that aren’t bookmarked as well as get rid of pages that you’ve never typed in the location bar.
The way you set these filters in browser.urlbar.default.behavior is slightly tricky if you’re not familiar with “bitmaps.” They’re not too complicated to deal with, but you will have to do some simple addition in your head. 
The way things work is each filter is given a number value, and to figure out what number to set for the preference, just add up the values of each filter you want.
If you want the location bar to only match URLs of pages you’ve visited like Firefox 2, set browser.urlbar.default.behavior to 17 (1 for visited pages + 16 for URLs).
Similarly, if you want to additionally restrict results to pages you’ve typed in, add in an extra 32 for “typed” — 49 for matching URLs of typed, visited pages. So for those who have used browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped in the past, you’ll probably want to add 32 to any other filters you want.
The whole set of values for each filter are as follows:
- 1: visited
- 2: bookmarked
- 4: tagged
- 8: match title
- 16: match URL
- 32: typed
Filter On-Demand
The last group of preferences are very related to the previous preference, and I’ve introduced their functionality in my post on Firefox 3.5 Restricts, Matches, Keywords.
Basically they do the same thing as the previous preference except you type in a special character to turn on a filter as you’re searching from the location bar. This lets you pick and choose when you want the filters to be in effect instead of always being on.
The default symbols for these “on-demand” filters are as follows:
- ^: browser.urlbar.restrict.history
- *: browser.urlbar.restrict.bookmark
- +: browser.urlbar.restrict.tag
- ~: browser.urlbar.restrict.typed
- #: browser.urlbar.match.title
- @: browser.urlbar.match.url
One big difference from what I described in the earlier post is the handling of empty filters. Setting these restrict/match preferences’ special symbols to nothing prevents you from (accidentally) activating that filter dynamically. However, you can still set the default.behavior to use that filter automatically.
51 Comments | Tags: AwesomeBar, Mozilla
Hi, thanks for your great explanations.
But I have issue, whicht is quite similar, but not the same:
I would like to filter out by a cerain keyword/string, tag, bookmark or domain-url with its pre- post suffixes. Like: “facebook”
So none of the url with the keyword “facebook” should appear. Neither “www.facebook.com” nor “http://de-de.facebook.com/” etc…
I am totally free of the way how this is done. Either do it with bookmars, tags or hard coding, I am free for anything
Do you have an Idea?
Thanks for any help!
> I would like to filter out by a cerain keyword/string
There’s no built-in automatic way to filter out those results, but if you’re trying to get rid of all traces of a particular site, that’s very easy to do in Firefox 3.1.
Just open up the History Sidebar (View -> Sidebar -> History), right-click the page you want to get rid of, and select “Forget About This Site.”
Alternatively, you can search your history from the Library (History -> Show All History) and type in your search, select all, hit delete.
Thanks Ed, for your help.
But I wouldlike to have those “keyworded” sites never to occour. It is for spontaneously usage by other users, who shouldnt see these visited sites. (I dont want to have an extra account just for these rare usages by others)
Ok, you say there is no automatic way. But what about writing these keywords in a certain file (I just guess usersChrome.css or maybe another), so that these sites were not registered?
Someone wrote a similar script, which doesn´t work anymore, if the “tagged” site, in following case a bookmark with “-hide” tag, has a suffix after the bookmarked url.
This is the script:
richlistitem[type="history"][title$="-hide"] {
display: none !important;
}
eg:
http://www.facebook.com //works
http://www.facebook.com/profile //does not work
I guess, there could be another script, or way?
Thank you for any help!
I remember running across an add-on that prevents certain sites from showing up in the location bar, and you provided a list of sites to block. But that’s not really helpful if someone else knows where to look for that list.
But if you’re okay with people able to find your list of removed pages, you can do a simple userChrome style such as..
.autocomplete-richlistitem[url*="facebook"] {
display: none;
}
That’ll prevent any urls with “facebook” from showing up. However this isn’t ideal because the list only shows the first 12 matches, and if all matches get hidden, nothing will be shown.
[...] had an interesting comment in my recent post on Firefox 3.1 Location Bar Preferences about hiding certain keywords from the location [...]
WOW!
Thanks! This works like a charm!
I´ll comment on the new post.
Hi Ed, two questions:
Is there a possibility to restrict searching to the start of url’s? (Excluding possible ‘www.’)
Will it be possible to sort the results alphabetically? (Again excluding possible ‘www.’)
I’m still searching far too long in all the results I get for development/staging/live sites of different customers
danny
> Is there a possibility to restrict searching to the start of url’s? (Excluding possible ‘www.’)
There’s an option to match at the beginning, but it doesn’t ignore www:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.urlbar.matchBehavior
> Will it be possible to sort the results alphabetically? (Again excluding possible ‘www.’)
The results always come back in “frecency” order. When would you want it alphabetically? What is being sorted alphabetically? Pages are matched on the title, tags, and url.
I would want it alphabetically on virtually any website I work on, I get 100s of results and frecency doesn’t help if I view all the pages in almost the same amounts – virtually zero. Finding a page I found an error on yesterday can be a bore if there is no logical order to the results you get and the list is longer than just a few items.
> Finding a page I found an error on yesterday can be a bore if there is no logical order
Have you tried searching with multiple words? You can type a word from the domain, a word from the title, or a word from the last part of the url.
For example, you could find this post by typing “edilee pref”.
This means you won’t run into the problem of typing “ed.” and seeing a bunch of pages you don’t really want.
No I haven’t, I always start with the beginning of the url to be sure I get completions for the right server, that is development.clientdomain or staging.clientdomain or http://www.clientdomain. As it already gives me a list then and I know the sites structure I should be able to find whatever I want – well at least I used to, can’t remember being always this annoyed about finding stuff
Oh and for what it’s worth, typing words instead of urls in a location bar is so far removed from any logic that I’m pretty sure it will take me until the abolition of the keyboard before I will think of doing that
> I know the sites structure I should be able to find whatever I want
Personally, doing development with the new location bar makes it much easier to get back to the page you want. Instead of typing out “development.site.com/subpath/file_you_want?query” you could just type “dev sub query” and jump straight to that page. Just look at how many characters you saved typing.
And if you want to view the page on the production site.. “prod sub fil”. And like I mentioned before about matching in the title, you can combine that with other unique parts of the url. So instead of searching for “dev sub query” you could maybe just type “query title”.
that would be prod client path file instead of de (select site home) pa and selecting the file I want – usually I know what I want when I see it, not when I’m typing
Ed,
If I am understanding what you are writing here correctly, setting “browser.urlbar.default.behavior” to 49 will functionally return the url bar to the behavior of the Firefox 2 bar. If this is the case, then why can there not be a checkbox added into Options for “Use Firefox 2 behavior for address bar” (or something along those lines) that simply sets the 49 into this line? Why must the users go digging around in about:config?
It is my understanding (from reading your previous posts) that you are a Mozdev. Can this feature PLEASE be added in? Then I can actually upgrade from FF2.0.0.20 without having a conniption fit every time I need to type in a URL.
Thanks!
(Yes, I’m one of the many that hate the FF3 bar. No, it’s nothing personal against you Devs, I just don’t like it. And please, any other posters, don’t waste my time by waving your e-peen about saying how much faster you can get things done with it. I really don’t care. I don’t like it and that’s that. Discussion over.)
Not exactly. A value of 49 will make it match typed urls that you’ve visited. Firefox 2 just matches urls in your history, but it only checks the beginning of the url and not anywhere.
Adding checkboxes and tweaks for the default options window isn’t the best solution for addressing all users, but those that want to configure Firefox behavior can use add-ons and about:config.
Curious, what about it don’t you like exactly? The display? The results? The ordering?
“Curious, what about it don’t you like exactly? The display? The results? The ordering?”
I have seen that question posed by Mozdevs before in response to someone disliking the “Awesome bar” and I think that the premise of the question bears addressing. It’s obvious from the question that as developers you view the bar as a collection of features and functions. From an end-user perspective, however, it is not a separate collection of features and functions, it is a single unified item. Thus it is impossible to get the answer you are looking for using that question. An end-user is simply going to say “I don’t like it” and you won’t be able to get the answer you seem to want. Also, there is the fact that even those of us (such as myself) that are aware of your perspective still aren’t able to articulate our answer in a way that would fit that question.
Ultimately, the best answer I can give to that question is this: Pretty much the entire thing. There isn’t a single feature or function of the FF3 address bar that I like. I hate it all equally. In the end, I just don’t think it’s appropriate to have an address bar be anything more than what it traditionally is outside of the use of a fancy extension. I find the “awesome bar” invasive, obtuse, ugly, clunky,frustrating and annoying.
As an example of one such frustration; When I start to type a URL, I just want it to do what I am expecting. That is: the FF2 behavior. FF3 just throws random shit at me. Seriously. I NEVER get what I want with it. After spending 6 MONTHS trying to “train” it, it still couldn’t even give me GOOGLE properly after I started typing in “www.goo”. Google wasn’t even in the RESULTS, and the results it gave me had NOTHING whatsoever to do with Google! That’s only one example. It does this for EVERY URL I try and type in!
I know, there are supposedly a whole HOST of “shortcuts” and various commands I can type in to get me to Google or wherever. The problem is that THAT REQUIRES EFFORT ON MY PART TO LEARN. To be blunt, I am NEVER going to do that. I have better things to do with my time. (Like grow skin cells!) Seriously. If your browser “innovation” requires a cheat-sheet and a correspondence course to learn, then you are doing something WRONG.
I also realize that some will say “But it’s so much easier just to type ‘&#^G’ (or whatever) to get Google!” But the thing they miss is that it’s not that I CAN type in those crazy symbols, but that I HAVE TO just to make it work! And there is NO WAY to learn those “shortcuts” without FIRST taking time out to LEARN THEM! So FF3 FORCES me to change a non-critical non-security-oriented behavior from an intuitive one to a completely NON-intuitive one. Do you see the problem with that?
While I fully expect that change happens, and that one can never expect technology to stand still, abandoning a proven and expected CORE behavior for an arcane and obtuse “improvement” is a massive, massive mistake.
All I am looking for is a way to make the “Awesome bar” GTFO of my browser interface and GTH. Preferably WITHOUT having to use 50 plugins and time digging around in about:config.
The “Awesome Bar” should be an EXTENSION. It would make a fantastic extension! Please, revert to the FF2 url bar and transform the awesome bar into an extension. Then people that want it can have it, and those that don’t want it won’t have it FORCED ON THEM.
Thanks.
There’s something wrong with Firefox or your settings then. There’s nothing that you need to learn to use the location bar. Like when I type “g”, it has http://www.google.com as the first result. I don’t need to type any special characters to filter results — those are only for additional ways to find pages.
Have you tried using a new profile for a little bit to see if there’s been something strange done to your current profile that prevents Firefox from working correctly?
I’ve had this happen on multiple installs on Win XP, Vista, Win7, Ubuntu Linux and Fedora. I just can’t get the proper behavior out of it. And it’s not just Google, it’s pretty much anything I want, I just get random results.
Keep in mind, that was just an example on a single item in the pantheon of problems I have with it. DO NOT get fixated on that, I’m not interested in having a discussion about that feature.
As I said before, it’s the entire concept of the bar as it is presented in FF3 that I have a problem with, not merely a single feature or function within it. I’m not so much looking for a way to “tweak” the awesome bar as I’m looking for a way to excise it. I don’t like anything about it and I want my traditional FF2 style behavior back. Anything short of that isn’t really what I need.
In the end I guess It boils down to the fact that while any and all of these functions may be very cool, the fact that they are;
A) Forced on me and
B) Simply and easily controllable
means that they are nothing short of maddening to try and use.
This is why I say a revert is in order. Put the URL bar back to FF2 form feel and function, and package up the Awesome bar in all it’s awesomey awesomeness as an extension. Then people that want it can have it, and those (like me) that don’t won’t have to use it.
As it stands right now there is no choice. It’s basically “Awesome Bar” or “Fuck You” from the Devs. I realize that as a Developer you may in NO WAY be intending that, but intended or not, that’s the message many users are getting. That needs to change.
Please, give me my Firefox back.
Choice B above should be NOT simply and easily controllable.
Is it me or is this browser.urlbar.default.behavior not working properly.
I would like to search for only typed URL’s & bookmarked.
but when i set the value of browser.urlbar.default.behavior to 34 (2 for Bookmarked + 32 for Typed) i get NO results in the smartbar.
When i set it to 32 i get the typed but i get no Bookmarks results.
What am i doing wrong here?
When you add together the values, you get an even-more-filtered result. So 34 means the results have to be *both* bookmarks and typed — bookmarks that you’ve typed in to the location bar previously.
[...] If you want more advanced control of the Location Bar behavior, check out Firefox 3.5 Location Bar Preferences. [...]
YES! YES! YES! This is exactly what I’ve been hoping for!!! I can finally leave FF2 behind! Changing the “awesome” bar to search only visited sites and then setting “browser.urlbar.default.behavior” to 17 fixed everything that was wrong with the “awesome” bar!!!!!!!!!!
And the great thing is that the people who prefer the new behaviour don’t have to sacrifice any functionality to get it. Everybody wins! Huzzah!
So what value do i need to type in to get either Bookmarked OR typed results
or is this not possible?
I am having a weird problem since I upgraded to 3.5. I set my preferences to show bookmarks and history, but once I Clear Recent History, bookmarks never suggested in the urlbar, EVER!
Tried changing the settings you suggested, tried resetting the option in Privacy in Options… nothing.
What do I do?! Please let me know if you have a suggestion.
thanks for the guide, now that I’ve set the value to 49, i can finally use the 3.5 version.
Hi there. Is there a way to show only visited bookmarks and history since being cleared? If you select ‘history’ from privacy and location bar, you get this but unfortunately minus the yellow stars to differentiate bookmarks from general URLs.
Many thanks,
Jonathan
If you select “History” from the location bar privacy, you can type “*” in the location bar to get it to show only bookmarks. Note that when you select “History,” it’ll show both visited pages and visited bookmarks. After you type “*”, you’ll only see visited bookmarks.
You can type the “*” anywhere, so you can start searching for a site by typing a word, and if there are too many results, just type an extra “*”.
Hi Ed. What I’m really looking for is for the yellow stars to always come up to show bookmarks without using the filters. If I select show ‘history and bookmarks’, is it possible to edit about:config to only show visited bookmarks (with the stars)? Thanks for your help.
Do you always only want visited bookmarks? The list will contain only entries with stars that are also pages you’ve visited since you last cleared your history.
If that’s the case, set browser.urlbar.default.behavior to 3:
1 for history + 2 for bookmarks
I have no answer to my question yet so i’ll repeat it.
What value do i need to type in to get either Bookmarked OR Typed results?
Is this even possible?
You can’t set that to be the default behavior, but what are you trying to do exactly? Are you just trying to find certain pages when you can’t find them in a large list?
You can type “*” at any point in the location bar to get bookmarks and “~” to get typed results. Typing both will get you only typed bookmarks.
I just want that when i start typing it only searches for Bookmarked or Typed results.
What i DON’t want to see is alll the SUB pages i visited of an url. It clutters a lot i think.
That’s why i just want bookmarked or typed results.
I haven’t tried this myself, but you should be able to set places.frecency.linkVisitBonus to 0 and normal links you visit shouldn’t show up. It might take some time for things to disappear though.. There’s no good way to force a recalculation of frecency.
But future links shouldn’t show up.
Not really what i was looking for.
But thanks for the input
Hi Ed,
Good work on updating the location bar. It’s added the much needed control I want over the location bar. Cheers
Hy, Ed! I need help! I don’t know how to properly do it so that “location” bar shows only sites/links I typed in! I tried everything but nothing works. Plz help!
What value are you using for browser.urlbar.default.behavior?
I put 32.
If you’ve ever selected entries from the list by first typing a few letters and selecting it from the list, it’ll be considered typed. Those results will be placed higher than those that you’ve never selected as well in the future.
So that might be why you’re getting results that you might not have actually completely typed out before.
To double check, you can go to a site you haven’t gone to before through a search engine, and try searching for that site in the location bar when you have default.behavior set to 32. Then if you type in that site and search for it in the location bar, it should then show up.
What about the the links you paste in the search bar? Does it show up too?
Those are considered typed. Basically any interaction from the location bar and its popup ending up at a page will be considered typed. The main other types are bookmarks, in-page link clicks, and automatically loaded pages.
Hi,
I can’t figure out how to keep your website Location Bar tab from popping up every time I restart Firefox. I’ve re-entered the info correctly in Options. I went so far as to uninstall this add-on. No joy. Perhaps a hidden setting somewhere?
Hi,
I can’t figure out how to keep your website Location Bar tab from popping up every time I restart Firefox. I’ve re-entered the info correctly in Options. I went so far as to uninstall this add-on. No joy. Perhaps a hidden setting somewhere?
Hi Ed,
I was using oldbar extension for a long time but it stopped work recently for some reason. So I decided to try the new location bar. For several weeks and I’m not used to it, yet. Instead, I hate it more and more so I decided to configure it to match old FF2 behavior. I’m using 3.5 now and I found this article with new options. Unfortunately, I don’t see any combination which’d fulfill my needs. Basically, I’m used to type first few characters from URL to select the address. Ignoring www prefix if any so the best match is the domain name or the first word of URL. I was completely happy with FF2 behaviour as I remember it automatically and don’t care about page titles which are meaningless in many cases.
Originally I had browser.urlbar.default.behavior = 0 and browser.urlbar.matchBehavior = 3. The good part is it starts searching from the beginning and the bad part it searches page title. So I changed browser.urlbar.default.behavior to 49 and then it searched URL but doesn’t skip www part. For sites with www it is necessary to type it which imakes it cumbersome. So I changed browser.urlbar.matchBehavior = 2. Now it is able to skip www part but also searches inside whole URL at word boundaries. I have two often used pages like this:
http://www.onesite.com/search.php?search_id=newposts
newsite.com
I was used to type ‘on’ to enter the first page and ‘ne’ to enter the second one. And guess what. ‘ne’ now matches ‘newposts’ in the first address and because I visit it often, it is on the top of the list. So I have to type 4 letters instead of 2 letters or select the second site from the list. Worse, as I was used to it, fingers are faster than brain and I usually press enter after ‘ne’ and enter the first site…
I’d prefer to disable this new awesome bar completely but it’d also help if you add one more browser.urlbar.matchBehavior possibility:
4 -> use only word boundaries when searching for typed text and give precedence according to position in the string.
Or just make it as smart as FF2 and simply skip www part…
Well, one personal note. I’ve read several related discussions and can’t understand FF developers’ attitude. I’m also software developer and can’t imagine something like this. You created a new feature and you feel it is great. Fine, but as you can see, there is rather big part of poor users who don’t like it, hate it and want the old one. Many of them presented good reasons for it. Why don’t give them what they want especially when it was available in the past? There are also many user who like it and some who don’t care and use any defaults. No problem, just make the great new feature default and allow all the silly stubborn people who want the old one a way how to turn it off. You apparently tried with described config values but as you can see, it is both insufficient and complicated for end users. One choices in preferences would be much better.
I understand totally what Bishounen and Mike have against FF3. Developers want to add bells and whistles to everything but a good simple interface that works well does not need enhancements and they certainly should not be forced on the user. Why cant the awesome bar be an option for those who are willing to put in the effort to learn about it? Surely the essence of good interface design is a simple basic structure with optional modules on top — FF2-plus-enhancements rather than FF3-minus-this-and-that-if-you-can-be-bothered. FF3 is in your face and a drag.
Great article and to any firefox developers: there are a few UI rules that have been around for 20+ years now that one would think developers would adhere to:
1. When you “invent” a “new” fancy UI “feature” then 2 minutes later design and implement an OBVIOUS convenient menu-driven way to turn it -off-.
2. Code ALL native menus, toolbars, toolbar buttons, text etc. to be moved to where the user wants it/them (within reason) and NOT hardcoded like IE7/IE8 (Firefox 2/3.5 is already good about this).
3. SORT *ALL* lists -everywhere- at all times, persistently and automatically according to how the user wants it/them sorted with the option to turn sorting off (see #1 above).
4. TEST your designs for USABILITY ie. outside of your own cubicle walls on other platforms on other computers on other operating systems etc. and take-to-heart feedback instead of saying “it’s by design” like M$ does.
5. Let’s stick to design basics please and keep firefox backward-compatible and avoid hardcoding UI elements and keep options that users can find and select as they prefer without have to install endless ‘extensions’ to turn messy UI “inventions” OFF.
Another huge change in FF that possibly messed things up is the saving all the data from tabs and windows visited. This is important if recovering from a crash of course, but it seems to require so much more memory (and possibly leak memory) that the browser hangs up upon any serious use. How to turn this off?? (FF shouldn’t turn on this feature IMHO unless it detects that enough RAM is available.)
I spent a couple of days trying to work around this… but with all of the latest FF builds (3.5.3 thru unreleased 3.5.6), the browser can’t handle opening just 2 tabs on sites with a lot of javascript and/or flash. Memory use rockets up from 300 megs to 800 megs at which point the disk spins constantly and the browser crashes. No matter whether virtual memory is turned on or off.
Facebook doesn’t usually crash FF, but more graphical sites like Myspace will crash it quickly. I tried a clean install just to make sure it wasn’t a corrupted user profile.
I am using an XP machine (centrino 1.5ghz) with 1GB of RAM — are the developers no longer supporting my configuration?? Anyway I am gonna have to switch to Chrome if I cant find a way to make it work.
-rc
Hey does anybody know if there is a way to make it so that the location bar only matches the beginning of URLs? For example, if I type in “pref”, then this website will be shown in the results since the word “preferences” is in the URL. Anyway to change it so that the only way for this website to show up would be to type in ed.agadak etc?
Letter caption changer to actual “Firefox 3.5 Location Bar Preferences,
but URL left intact:
http://ed.agadak.net/2009/02/firefox-31-location-bar-preferences