When you start typing into the Location bar in Firefox 3, the "Smart Location Bar" will try to guess where you are trying to go, based on where you have been - it can help you get back to pages whose web address you only vaguely remember by showing them in the autocomplete drop-down menu. Over time, it adapts to your preferences and offers better matches, based on how frequently you visit each site and how recent those visits were.

The Location bar can still be used for:

• Location bar search - Typing searchterm into the Location bar
• Smart keyword search - Typing keyword searchterm

Table Of Contents

• Overview
• Using the autocomplete list
• Tips
• Removing autocomplete results
• Hiding bookmarks in the Smart Location Bar

Overview

Type something into the Location bar, and the autocomplete drop-down will show matching sites from your browsing history, as well as sites you have bookmarked and tagged. Matched terms are highlighted, making the list of results easy to scan.

In the example below, simply typing aw into the Location bar brings up a list of visited and bookmarked pages for away and awesome.

Using the autocomplete list

Click on the Location bar to focus it. Start typing a web address, page title, or tag name into the Location bar. Firefox will immediately try to guess where you are going and the autocomplete list will display.

Press the down arrow on the keyboard to highlight the first entry in the autocomplete list. Press up or down to scroll through the autocomplete list. Press EnterReturn to go to the selected page. You can also use the mouse pointer to click on the item to load the selected page.

The part of the entry that matches what you've typed will show in bold. The Location bar will display results for:

• Web addresses from pages in history that match what you have typed
• Page titles from history that match what you have typed
• Bookmark titles that match what you have typed
• Bookmarks with tag names that match what you've typed

The Location bar will find results for you across word boundaries, and the more letters you enter, the narrower the results get. In the example below, the entry s m matches pages that have both s and m - they do not have to be together.

Tips

• When you are looking to go to a web site you have previously visited, type a few letters from its web address or page title. Scroll through the autocomplete entries and find the page in the list (type another letter if it is not shown in the list). Press EnterReturn to go to the selected web address. Firefox will give this entry/result combination higher weight in the future.
• Do not clear the Browsing History - usually the richest source of autocomplete entries is from the title/web address combination. Clearing Browsing History will remove these entries from the results.
• Bookmark and tag frequently - used pages. The Location bar will match on the name you give the bookmark and also tags associated with the bookmark. See the Bookmarks article for more information on how to use bookmarks in Firefox. You can improve your autocomplete results by tagging pages with easily-typed tag names.

Removing autocomplete results

If you want to remove an entry from the autocomplete list:

1. Select the entry in the Location bar with the arrow keys or the mouse pointer
2. Press DeleteShift+Delete to remove the item from the list.

If you want to remove all the history results from the autocomplete list, clear Firefox's Browsing History. See the Clearing private data article for instructions.

Hiding bookmarks in the Smart Location Bar

To prevent bookmarks from appearing in the Smart Location Bar, see Hiding bookmarks in the Smart Location Bar.