Making Firefox 3 Bearable

• Posted by B Jones on June 23rd, 2008 - Comment on this Post »

Maybe it’s just me, but since I downloaded and started using Firefox 3 web browser, I’ve been extremely frustrated with the behavior of the new “Smart Location Bar”.

This thing is supposed to be “A quick way to get to the sites you love—even the ones with addresses you only vaguely remember”, but for me, it’s just plain cumbersome and annoying, spouting out totally off the wall guesses at what I’m typing, when I just want the regular auto-complete feature.

I searched all of the menus with no luck, and even went as far as to switch back to Firefox 2.

Fortunately, I found a fix for this Location bar issue.

1. Type about:config into the location bar, and press enter/ return to access the advanced preferences.
- You’ll get an alert saying: something like… “This may void your warranty”, but just click the button to Accept.

2. In the long list of items, look for browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped (you can either scroll down, or use the search)

3. double click it to set it to TRUE.

4. Finally, to make the auto complete function only show single line suggestions (instead of the 2 line suggestions), you’ll need to install a Firefox extension called the oldbar extension.

Doing this has made the working with the new Firefox much more bearable.

FireBug
If you’re a web developer, one more mandatory update you’ll need to make to get your new firefox up to speed is upgrading to the new Firebug extension.

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