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

Posted by Wilmer van der Gaast on
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

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Joonathan on :

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'

Wilmer on :

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?

Jorge on :

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

Eugene on :

Thank you for this! This is indeed the most annoying feature so far. Not every url has to start from www

PJ on :

Thank you SO much for this! This stupid freaking !#@$()!&#@$ thing made my "file uploader" in coldfusion TOTALLY not work -- but only on firefox (which was so unexpected to me it took eons even to discover that was the case). For whatever reason when I do a flash-tag file upload it's looking for mydomain.com/dir/ but it's at www.mydomain.com/dir/ in the browser and instead of calling the file it calls the crossdomain.xml file. Really appreciate your posting and solution.

LB on :

This 'feature' is not good for those with large intranet and internal DNS.
We use a lot of that, and have generic enough names that when an intranet server goes down, ffox will take you to an unexpected place.

Tganks for the solution, it still working in ff 28.0

Clodhopper on :

Thank you so much. Now I just need to figure out how to get rid of address bar searching.

SO IRRITATING!

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