search one word in awesome bar
I am using google chrome and firefox. I also use icedragon which is a modified version of firefox. When I enter one word in the awesome bar, it takes a lot of time until it searches the word in my search engine (and from what my search revealed to me it is trying to lookup the word as www.MySingleWord.com in the DNS). In any other browser I used (even in icedragon which is firefox based) immediately after entering a single word in the url bar I get search results. This is really annoying. I am not looking for workarounds like making a shortcut for the search engine or such. I only want the behavior that is in all other browsers. Is it possible to tell firefox not to search the word as a website name? Thanks.
All Replies (5)
- Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter.
- Click the big button to bypass the warning.
- In the Search bar, paste browser.fixup.alternate.enabled
- In the search results, double-click browser.fixup.alternate.enabled to set its value to false.
Thanks for the reply. I already tried this method. It does not work for me though. There are other people that tested this method and it did not work for them too.
It might be a bug.
Actually, I don't think it is. It is actually a feature. Because Firefox does act completely reasonable from one point of view. It tries to resolve the word in DNS. This feature allows the user to just type "google"+Enter and go to www.google.com. My point is for some people (which from my search, contain a huge proportion of the community) this is annoying and they just want a search with their chosen search engine when they enter one word + Enter. The correct way to do this, anyways, is to be able to disable this feature. P.S. I found the "omnibar" extension which does exactly this. I just am thinking why such simple intuitive feature that is implemented in almost all major browsers is not present in FF! Seems like the developers don't care at all to me.
The only workaround that comes to mind is assigning a keyword to your search engine of choice. If for example, if you assigned b to Bing, you could type b lophotrochozoa into the address bar to search for that word with Bing. You can assign keywords to search engines in the Manage Search Engines window.
Someone suggested adding a preference to disable DNS lookups for single words entered into the address bar, but the idea was rejected.
If you have a better suggestion, feel free to submit a new bug report if a relevant one doesn't already exist. Bug reports aren't just for defects; suggestions for improvements are also acceptable ("enhancement bug reports").