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| tags:tech firefox

Reverting Firefox's recent URL bar suggestion order change

A recent update to Firefox changed the order of suggestions when you started typing in the URL bar (or “address bar”). It used to be that you’d get recently visited URLs first but the change caused search suggestions to appear first. I almost always navigate to sites I know by typing the first few letters of the domain name and almost never used the search suggestions so this change cause consternation.

A firefox URL bar suggestions dropdown showing suggested searches before recently visited sites

The URL bar suggestions after Firefox "Improved" the experience in a recent update and changed the suggestions order

Fearing for the longevity of my down arrow key caused the wear of all the extra pressing to get down to the recently visited URLs section I searched for a solution. It turns out that you can change the order of the suggestions in the config. To do so:

  1. Open a new Firefox tab
  2. Type about:config
  3. Accept any warnings (yolo)
  4. Type browser.urlbar.showSearchSuggestionsFirst into the search field
  5. Toggle the value

You shouldn’t need to restart Firefox for the change to take effect, and should now have your URL history back where it was before the search suggestions.

A firefox URL bar with recently visited sites before search suggestions

URL bar suggestion order, now fixed