6 Tips and Tricks For Firefox Address Bar

The Firefox address bar can be put to good use and you can tweak it according to your needs. You can hide the search suggestions, interchange the position of Firefox awesome bar and the address bar and do a lot of creative things from the address bar itself. Here is a list of 5 simple tips and tricks for the Firefox address bar:

1. Turn off Google Search Suggestions in Firefox Awesome Bar

Firefox has a nice awesome bar placed at the right top of the browser window. This is how the “Awesome bar” looks in Firefox:

By default, the awesome bar consists of a list of search engines e.g Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Answers, Creative Commons and Wikipedia. The awesome bar lets you perform a search in any of these search engines right from the browser and without requiring to open the search engine in a new tab. This is useful but may be embarrassing some times. If you want to turn off the search suggestions in Firefox Awesome bar, follow the steps mentioned below:
1. Click the Search icon placed at the left top of Firefox Awesome bar and select “Manage Search Engines”.

2. In the next window, deselect the checkbox “Show Search suggestions” and press Ok. You are done.

The Firefox awesome bar search suggestions feature is disabled forever.

2. Search From the Firefox Address Bar

You can use the address bar to search using your favorite search engine (lets’ assume Google). Just follow the simple steps mentioned below:
1. Type about:config in Firefox address bar and click “I will be careful, I promise”.

2. In the next Window that appears, type keyword.URL as the filter type.

3. Double click the “Value” field and enter http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=

Press Ok and you are done. Type anything in the Firefox address bar and hit enter to perform search at Google. You can use the same procedure and tweak Firefox address bar to search for a keyword on a different search engine instead.

3. Turn Off Website and Bookmark Suggestions in Firefox Address Bar

The Firefox address bar has two useful features. First, you can bookmark websites right from the address bar by clicking the small yellow “star” icon placed at the extreme right. Second, when you type something – the Firefox address bar shows a list of websites as suggestions. These websites are shown depending upon your browsing history and bookmarks.
It can be really annoying to see address bar suggestions and you may want to completely turn off suggestions from showing up in the Firefox address bar. Just follow the simple steps mentioned below:
1. Click “Tools -> Options” and navigate to the “Privacy” tab.
2. You will see a setting for the Firefox Location bar under “When using the Location bar suggest”. Choose “Nothing” as the option.

3. That’s it. You have just tweaked Firefox not to show location bar suggestions from your browsing history and bookmarks.

4. Interchange the Position of Firefox Address Bar and Firefox Awesome Bar

If you use the Firefox Awesome bar for frequent searches, you might want to align it in the center. You may  want to interchange the positions of the Firefox address bar and the Firefox Awesome bar. The process is very simple and takes just a couple of minutes:
1. Right click on an empty area just above the Firefox awesome bar and select “Customize”.

2. This will open the customization window. Ignore the customization window and move the mouse cursor towards the left edge of the Firefox Awesome bar.

3. As soon as you move the cursor to the left edge, you will notice that the mouse cursor changes into a “hand icon”. Now select the Firefox Awesome bar with the “hand icon” and drag the bar towards the Firefox address bar

. This will interchange the positions of Firefox address bar and awesome bar. You will get the Firefox awesome bar aligned in the center as shown below:

5. Combine the Firefox Address Bar and the Firefox Progress Bar

Here is a very quick and easy way to combine the progress bar with Firefox address bar (just like Safari). Download and install the Fission extension for Firefox, restart the browser and it’s all done.

Later, you can change the colors and position of the progress bar from the extension options. (Tools > Addons > Fission > Options)

6. Increase The Font Size of Firefox Address Bar

Do you find it real hard to read the URL’s in Firefox address bar? Want to increase the font size of Firefox address bar text? Install the Make Address Bar Font Size Bigger extension for Firefox. After installation, restart Firefox and you will see that the address bar font has grown bigger and better. Here is an example:

Also check out some really useful Firefox about config tricks and hacks.