Is there any way to have Firefox's address bar suggest only SOME of my bookmarked URLs, but not all of them?
Hello.
I run a very locked-down Firefox for privacy reasons, and part of that includes having history disabled entirely. As a result, I do not get suggestions in my address bar for frequently visited websites, as my browser does not store history.
Instead, I rely on bookmarks, and I allow the address bar to suggest my bookmarked URLs to me. For example, I have my favourite subreddits bookmarked, so I can type "gifs" or "re g" or "reddit" or something along those lines, and Firefox will suggest the bookmarked URL corresponding with that subreddit. That all works fine, if I only have top-level site/subreddit URLs bookmarked.
The problem is that I also want to use bookmarks to actually bookmark specific pages that I'm interested in and want to come back to later. For example, this might be a specific Reddit thread. The problem is that if I then type in "reddit" in my address bar, Firefox will suggest that bookmarked URL when I don't want it to.
Even worse, for some reason Firefox seems to suggest these "specific page" bookmarks before the general "favourite site" bookmarks, so they do get in the way and hurt my productivity. For example, if I have /r/gifs bookmarked, as well as a whole bunch of specific threads on /r/gifs, typing "gifs" will suggest all the specific thread URLs instead of the front page of the subreddit.
I've tried re-ordering the bookmarks in my bookmark list, thinking that maybe Firefox suggests the first or last bookmarks first, but that didn't seem to make any difference...
So my question is, is there any way to tell Firefox to just not suggest certain bookmarks? Or at least a way to put some bookmarks at the bottom priority, so it suggests them at the bottom? Maybe something in about:config or some trick I can use when ordering my bookmarks?
I am aware that selecting a suggested URL in the address bar and pressing the Delete key removes it, but it only seems to do so for that session, and it's a problem again on the next start of Firefox. :(
Any ideas? I would prefer a solution that doesn't use any add-ons or extensions, if possible.
Thanks in advance.
All Replies (8)
We are about to embark on a strange journey -- into the computation of frecency -- the score used to rank potential matches on the autocomplete drop-down. I'm not an experienced guide, but I can suggest some experiments.
Also, how can this work with zero history? No idea.
First, the math is described here: https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Mozilla/Tech/Places/Frecency_algorithm
Second, you can play here:
(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful.
(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste frec and pause while the list is filtered
To blunt the impact of recency of visits, you can try setting each time band to have equal weight. That would be, for example, double-click these and give them all the same low value as places.frecency.defaultBucketWeight which is 10:
places.frecency.firstBucketWeight => 10 places.frecency.secondBucketWeight => 10 places.frecency.thirdBucketWeight => 10 places.frecency.fourthBucketWeight => 10
That should hopefully make recency a neutral factor, and within any session, frequency would start bringing the main address above that. Or maybe not, if you have disabled history.
Could you let us know the results of your tests, and/or if you search more widely, the results of your research?
Thank you for your suggestion. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to make any difference - perhaps because I have history disabled, as you said. I made the changes that you said, and tried restarting my browser in case that was necessary, but it still displays suggestions in the same order. I also tried again re-ordering my bookmarks, in case that would work after adjusting the frecency settings, but it still doesn't help.
I wonder what the fallback/default order is if there is no history and Firefox needs to break a tie between entries with the identical score? Does it seem to be "most recently bookmarked first" or is it more nuanced than that? Someone more familiar with that part of the program might know the actual answer.
Hmm... You might be on to something there. I checked the "added on" date/times for my bookmarks, and the suggestions that I get in my address bar do seem to correspond to that, with the newest bookmarks being shown first. I also just tried adding a new bookmark(with the URL containing the same keyword), and that new bookmark is now suggested before any others.
I wonder if there's any way to edit the bookmarks so that my favourite ones have an "added on" time of some distant date in the future?
Bobama said
I wonder if there's any way to edit the bookmarks so that my favourite ones have an "added on" time of some distant date in the future?
I have some ideas involving hacking files and re-importing them, but hopefully someone can think of a safe way and test to make sure it holds up. Last thing you need is for Firefox to think your bookmarks database is corrupted and roll it back to an old backup.
I skimmed through the code on the source site file and looked at the ORDER BY clauses in the SQL queries.
https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-release/source/toolkit/components/places/UnifiedComplete.js
At least two of the database queries break ties based on the ID of the URL in the database, in descending order, AKA highest first (lines 133 and 233).
That means even if one were to hack the date, it wouldn't trick those queries because the more recently added bookmark will always have a higher numeric ID in the database -- the ID auto-increments as new places are added (and with no history, every URL is a new place).
So an add-on would be needed to override it.
I see. That's unfortunate, but thanks. I really appreciate you looking into this in so much depth.
As a possible workaround, I suggest making a folder on your desktop called bookmarks and then just drag the site (you can click on and drag the 'show site information' area to the left of the url in the address bar) into that folder. Then you can use that folder as your list of 'bookmarks' which will not affect the 'awesome bar'.