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Smart Location Bar

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The Firefox Location bar can be used to enter the web addresses (URLs) of websites you want to visit. In Firefox 3 and above, the "Smart Location Bar" can also guess where you are trying to go, based on where you have been. If you don't remember the web address of a certain page, you can type a few words from its title instead. 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:

Table Of Contents

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, 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 website 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.
3.0:
  • 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.

3.5/3.6:
  • 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.
3.0:

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.

3.5/3.6:

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

3.0:
Note: Autocomplete items from bookmarks will not be removed from the results if you attempt to delete them or clear the browsing history. These items have a star. To remove these items, delete the associated bookmark.

3.5/3.6:
Note: Autocomplete items from bookmarks will not be removed from the results if you attempt to delete them or clear the browsing history. These items have a star. To remove these items, delete the associated bookmark, or exclude bookmarks from the autocomplete results.

3.0:

Hiding bookmarks in the Smart Location Bar

To prevent bookmarks from appearing in the Smart Location Bar, see Cannot clear Location bar history.

3.5/3.6:

Controlling behavior

Settings

You can turn off the Smart Location feature, or restrict the autocomplete results to exclude your bookmarks or history:

  1. At the top of the Firefox windowOn the menu bar, click on the ToolsFirefoxEdit menu, and select Options...Preferences....
  2. Select the Privacy panel.
  3. Beside When using the location bar, suggest: select any of the following:

    • History and Bookmarks: Use both browsing history and bookmarks in the Location bar's autocomplete list.
    • History: Use browsing history in the Location bar's autocomplete list, but don't use bookmarks.
    • Bookmarks: Use bookmarks in the Location bar's autocomplete list, but don't use browsing history.
    • Nothing: Turn off the autocomplete list.
  4. Click OK to close the Options windowClick Close to close the Preferences windowClose the Preferences window

On the fly

If you are looking for a specific type of result, like a bookmark or tag, you can speed up the process of finding it by typing in special characters:

  • Add ^ to search for matches in your browsing history
  • Add * to search for matches your bookmarks
  • Add + to search for matches in pages you've tagged
  • Add @ to search for pages that have web addresses (URLs) that match what you've typed
  • Add # to search for pages that have titles or tag names that match what you've typed

For example, if you're looking for a page you bookmarked called Mozilla Firefox Support, you might type mozilla. The autocomplete results appear, but might not show the page you want.

You can narrow your results bookmarks only by making your search string mozilla *.

If you still have too many results, you can further restrict the search by making your search string mozilla * support #. Now the autocomplete list will only show bookmarked pages with mozilla and support in the page title.


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