Disabling the stupidest FireFox feature ever (adding www/com to URLs)

Tuesday, November 10. 2009

Disabling the stupidest FireFox feature ever (adding www/com to URLs)

Every few days it happens to me that I mistype a URL, and Firefox thinks it can fix it by adding www. and/or .com to it. This often brings me to some stupid webpage instead of the intranet page I was looking for, or just generates another broken URL that needs more work for me to fix because I have to undo what Firefox did and then still fix my typo.

I finally found out how to disable that stupid feature and am sure more people are wondering about that. Since it took me a while to find out how to do this, I guess I'll just write a (maybe easier to find) blog post about it.

In short: about:config -> browser.fixup.alternate.enabled.

Fixup. Yeah right.

For a similar feature that adds some other TLD to the URL if you accidentally have alt/ctrl or something pressed when you press Enter, there's a plugin called ClumsyFingers, I think. Fortunately my fingers aren't clumsy enough yet that I need that one.

I'm still in Japan, now in Hiroshima for the IETF meeting. Japan's fantastic. :-D

Posted by Wilmer van der Gaast in Intarweb at 11:31 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

Thankyou so much for this - particularly important now that ISPs such as comcast are hijacking DNS and redirecting to their own for-profit 'search page'

#1 Joonathan on 2009-11-16 19:21 (Reply)

Yeah, if my ISP would start doing that that'd almost be a good reason for me to leave them. Fortunately I'd never notice since I always run my own BIND instance anyway.

But how do these DNS hijacks affect this Firefox misfeature exactly? I think Comcast will never return NxDomains so Firefox will never break your URLs anyway?

#1.1 Wilmer on 2009-11-21 15:39 (Reply)

Thanks, it's almost 2012, but this setting still works, and this is STILL the most stupid feature ever.

#2 Jorge on 2011-12-20 16:06 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_. To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above: BBCode format allowed
	Remember Information? Subscribe to this entry