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Comment by k_ | Hacker News Reader

That's actually the thing I want to make sure I can entirely disable before even thinking of updating to FF33. I'm sick of browsers and other software trying their best to send as much data as they can to search engines (hi google). If I want to perform a search, I do it, period. I know it's absolutely not the case for most users, though..

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This is tested in latest Nightly:

Open up: about:config?filter=keyword.enabled

Set it to false.

Now things like "bjafbsaofbdnaspolnas" will just end up at "http://www.bjafbsaofbdnaspolnas.com/".

I'm pretty sure that Firefox doesn't send anything from the location bar. At least, my location bar doesn't perform any search outside of history + bookmarks, unless I press "return".

Nope. On FF33, when I type in a one-word, no-TLD hostname in location bar, it takes me to my default search engine, while asking "Do you want to go to hostname?"

The whole point of having separate bars is to clearly distinguish use, and to ensure data doesn't leak. This bothers me, too.

Note that you can use `//` prefix to mean `http://`. E.g. if you want to go to `http://foo`, you type `//foo` in the address bar. You can also use `//` URLs in HTML, it expands to `http://` or `https://` depending if the page is served via HTTP or HTTPS (this is cross-browser)

And use the ? prefix for searches from the address bar that would otherwise be interpreted as something else, also cross-browser.

that's an interesting one. I usually use a single quotation mark when searching a URL since Google doesn't interpret it as "verbatim" anymore and seems to just discard it.

Does this actually work in address bar? Both FF and Chrome open file://... URL if you type //...

Did you type // and not \\ ? \\ does expand to file:/// for me, trying to open a network share. But // to file:/// never happened to me.

BTW, actually it seems that if I type `//foo` and `http://foo/` can't be resolved by DNS server/hosts file, Firefox does Google search, while Chrome tells that 'webpage is not available'.

Note also that some browsers want to fix http://foo to http://www.foo.com - for Firefox, see [1] and [2]

[1] about:config?filter=browser.fixup

[2] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:config_Entr...

I typed // (OS X)

> On FF33, when I type in a one-word, no-TLD hostname in location bar, it takes me to my default search engine, while asking "Do you want to go to hostname?"

Do you mean after you press enter? I can't replicate your finding for words that are simply typed into the location bar.

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