Disabling the annoying "Visit ..." entry in the Firefox address-bar drop-down
I find the new address bar features introduced in a recent Firefox version very annoying. The suggestion of search terms can be disabled easily (does anyone really want to have everything entered into the address bar sent to an external service?), but this still leaves this annoying "Visit ..." entry at the top of the list of visited addresses.
This entry is annoying for several reasons:
- It does not add any functionality: Just hitting enter has (nearly) the same effect as selecting this entry.
- It can easily be selected accidentally when you actually want the top entry from the list of visited addresses.
- Typically, it does not suggest the address you actually want to visit for two reasons: First, it suggests visiting the top URL of the suggested site, even if you always visit a specific path. Second, it suggest a plain (HTTP) URL, even if the site actually only supports HTTPS and you never visited it with HTTP.
I have no idea, why they added such a stupid feature to Firefox at all (I suspect that it was originally designed for a different purpose that really only makes sense if you also enable the other features) and why they did not add an option to the UI for disabling it.
Fortunately, someone found out that it can be disabled by setting the browser.urlbar.unifiedcomplete option to false in about:config. Seeing how often the page with the solution has already been visited, I am definitely not the only person who is annoyed by this stupid new feature.