How do you remove address bar suggestions, specifically that appear *before* you start typing something?
I found that you can hold shift+delete, or hover over *search* suggestions and click the "..." to remove suggestions, but for the list of suggestions that appear when you simply click on the address bar to make it active, neither of these work and there doesn't seem to be anywhere in the settings that allow you to manually remove items from this list. There was a website that I visited very frequently over the last 1-2 years, that I do not need to visit pretty much ever again, it's at the very top of the suggestions every time I click the address bar even though I haven't visitted the website in months. There are other websites in there that I don't want, even if I do still visit them, I don't necessarily want or need them to be suggested. The only way I have found is to go into my history, search the domain name, and delete all traces of the website from my all-time history. This worked for the first website I mentioned, but I don't want to have to delete my history for each website I don't want in my suggestions. Long-term history can be extremely useful. Plus it's just a super janky way of doing something very basic that should be as simple as "Right click > Delete suggestion", especially as that already exists for search suggestions. Is there an obscure or hidden way of doing this that I may be missing?
When I found the shift+del method and the "..." method I spent a good 10 minutes not understanding why it wasn't working, thinking my FF was outdated as apparently these were added in version 113, but I am on 114 so that didn't make sense. It was only after a while that I discovered that search suggestions are apparently handled separately from the default suggestions shown when you simply click on the address bar. This doesn't seem all that streamlined, so I guess as a bonus feature suggestion: make it so that the same method applies to both types of suggestions? I assume feature suggestions don't go here so I might make an actual suggestion later...
Thanks.
All Replies (4)
To remove specific suggestions from the address bar in Firefox, you can follow these steps:
1)Start typing in the address bar until the suggestion you want to remove appears. 2)Use the arrow keys on your keyboard to highlight the suggestion you want to remove. 3)Press the Shift + Delete keys on your keyboard. This should remove the selected suggestion from the address bar.
If the above method doesn't work, you can try clearing your browsing history for a more comprehensive solution. Here's how to do it:
1)Click on the menu button (three horizontal lines) in the top-right corner of the Firefox window. 2)Select "Options" (Windows) or "Preferences" (Mac). 3)In the left sidebar, click on "Privacy & Security." 4)Scroll down to the "History" section. 5)Click on the "Clear History" button. 6)In the dialog box that appears, choose a time range (e.g., "Everything" to remove all history). 7)Make sure the "Browsing & Download History" option is checked. 8)Click on the "Clear Now" button. This will clear your browsing history, including the suggestions in the address bar.
I hope this helps :)
Hi Mitch,
Thank you for taking the time to reply.
Unfortunately, I think you may have misunderstood what I'm trying to do.. The first solution you provided is the first one that I spoke about in my original post, which I tried already, but as I explained I'm trying to remove suggestions that appear the moment you *click* the address bar, not the suggestions that appear when you begin *typing* in the address bar (these two types of suggestions seem to be different, and are handled differently by FF) Using Shift+Del does work for removing suggestions that appear when you begin typing in the address bar, but it does not work for suggestions that appear by default before you begin typing aka the suggestions that appear as soon as you click on the address bar.
As for your 2nd solution, this does work, and I successfully removed one of the suggestions by typing the domain name into my history, selecting every item in the history containing that domain naime, and deleting them all. But as I also mentioned in my original post, this isn't an ideal way of removing suggestions if you want to preserve your browsing history.
What I was asking effectively was "is there a way to remove the suggestions that appear when you click on the address bar (but not the ones that appear when you begin typing) that does not involve deleting history, as I already figured out that this method works, given that I had already done it and mentioned it in my post, but that it isn't an ideal method because I don't want to have to delete my browsing history for every suggestion that I don't want". So basically if deleting browsing history is the only method, the answer to my question would simply be "no, there is no other way than deleting history".. And this would suck, because it seems like a basic functionality that should exist without roundabout ways such as deleting browsing history, but if there is no other way then I guess I just can't do what I'm trying to do.. :/
Thank you for taking the time to reply though- and if you do happen to know of some other way to delete the specific suggestion type that I'm asking about, I'm still all ears! It could be that there is a way that I just haven't found yet, but I'm starting to think it's more likely that Mozilla simply haven't implemented a way to delete default suggestions..
Best wishes Kora
Also, oh my god I'm really sorry, I downvoted your reply without really thinking about it because I read "did this solve your problem?" and subconsciously just thought "well, no unfortunately not" and before thinking about it I clicked the thumbs down. After posting my reply I see that it actually appears publicly that your comment was downvoted. I'm sorry, that is really harsh and was not deserved.. As soon as I saw it and realised consciously I realised it was completely too harsh and had I thought about it for a sec, I absolutely wouldn't have downvoted it, because you clearly took time to try to help me, and the solutions you offered could be exactly the help another user is looking for. I feel really bad, I'm sorry.. (I tried to undo the downvote but it won't let me..) I'm sorry.. :(
Hi Kora, the hardest part is discovering the name of this feature.
When you first click in the address bar, before typing anything for Firefox to match off of, it displays the first 8-10 "Shortcuts" from the built-in Firefox Home / new tab page.
Individual shortcuts can be edited/rearranged on the Firefox Home / new tab page, or you can remove the entire list of shortcuts from the address bar drop-down.
Editing. To build a list you'll actually find useful, see: Customize items on your Firefox New Tab page
Hiding. Alternately, you can turn off Shortcuts as a category of address bar suggestions with a single checkbox on the Settings page, Privacy & Security settings:
Reference: Address bar autocomplete suggestions in Firefox
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