Firefox quantum, disable search in address field

Question

I've been looking everywhere but cannot find a way to disable the search from the Address field in the Firefox Quantom.

No problem adding a search bar, but that doesn't negate the search from the address bar.

I'm currently on 57.0.3.

Ventage

Answer 1

You should be able to disable search in the address bar (aka awesomebar) by:

• going to about:config;
• searching for the browser.urlbar.suggest.searches preference;
• setting it to false.

You may notice that there are other browser.urlbar.suggest.* preferences there. You can tweak them to personalize your urlbar suggestion experience.

Update: to disable searching when typing an address (e.g. the URI fails to resolve and it tries to use a search engine) also disable keyword.enabled in the preferences. To prevent the bar from guessing/fixing the typed URI (e.g. typing fred is changed to fred.com) there's another pref, browser.fixup.alternate.enabled. It needs to be set to false to disable URI fixup.

Verada

I changed that to false but it only removed the search suggestions. It still takes you to the default search engine if you type a non-url and click the arrow. I checked out the other browser.urlbar settings and none of them that I modified changed the undesired behaviour. thanks. – Ventage

I've added another detail to the answer: this pref (along with the other ones) should do what you want. – Verada

keyword.enabled=false worked to keep the browser from visiting the search engine. It did have a different effect. I used just the word 'frank' in the url address bar. After a short period it timed out and gave me a message that it could not to the destination in time 'url: frank.com'. The message is from our macafee gateway but I'll try it on my personal device too to see if it still tries to add information to the address that wasn't included. – Ventage

Searching for just the word 'frank' still looks for frank.com when not using a network with macafee gateway. I hope it always checks the local web server first. :) – Ventage

Ok, there seems to be another pref, browser.fixup.alternate.enabled, that needs to be set to false to disable URI fixup. Sorry for not catching this earlier :) – Verada

Yes, that does it. I know it wasn't specific to the original question but you should add that info into your answer. thanks again. – Ventage