Marketing.fm – Eric Friedman

I recently downloaded firefox 3.0 and I think it is great. It is fast and secure and works very well. With that said I had one question that I wanted to help others answer as well. After using FF 3.0 for a few days the Smart Location bar started to populate with my browsing habits, and I found it distracting and not very useful. Also known as the address bar, the smart location bar in Firefox tries to guess where you are trying to go using the places you have already been. I could see how this could be helpful, but I wanted to turn it off.

After searching for awhile I finally came across the official Mozilla instructions on how to turn off the Smart Location bar in Firefox 3.0. Disabling the smart location bar can be done in a few easy steps:

1. In the Location bar, type about:config, and press Enter.
* The about:config “This might void your warranty!” warning page may appear. Click I’ll be careful, I promise!, to continue to the about:config page.
2. Search for the preference browser.urlbar.maxRichResults.
3. Double-click the browser.urlbar.maxRichResults preference and enter a value of -1.
4. From the menu at the top of the Firefox windowbar, select File and then select the Exit Quit FirefoxQuit menu item.
5. Start Firefox again.

This should work perfectly – but remember you edit your config area at your own risk. I hope that there is a simple check box to turn this off in future versions.