Force Firefox Autofill To Behave By Removing “WWW” URLs
Lifehacker reader Jordan loves the easy browsing that enabling auto-completion in Firefox provides, but found it just didn’t work for some sites. The fix? Removing bookmarks with “www” stuck at the front.
So while he’d normally be able to type “li” and automatically get a Lifehacker URL, Facebook and the New York Times just didn’t seem to come up. He discovered that typing straight-up facebook.com or nytimes.com re-directed to www.facebook.com and www.nytimes.com, which Facebook’s autofill feature wanted him to type in a few w keys for.
One solution would be to edit your bookmarks rigorously; another would be to switch to using a personal favourite extension, Enter Selects. But Jordan’s solution is a bit more straight-forward:
The first step was to delete these (www) bookmarks – they were overriding my history.
Then, the next time I typed in ny, I hit down until I found www.nytimes.com. Then I hit shift-delete to delete this URL from my autocomplete.
Finally, I had to type ny again and arrow down to nytimes.com. I hit enter, and now whenever I type ‘ny’ and hit enter I go to http://nytimes.com. Finally!
It’s a tiny tweak, but one that really makes a difference for the pages you’re trying to get to all the time. Problems to Solve » Make Firefox’s URL Autofill Behave [solved] [via Source]
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
@RelativeRon: They should give that as an option, or an extension, but I find some of those extended URLs very helpful. For example, I can type "Facebook person's name" and I can get to their profile very quickly.
Greg Early
I have never, ever had a site NOT come up using autofill.
I am also of the opinion that EnterSelects should be required for any FF installation. Mozilla should integrate it directly.
jkrell
This is OK, but what is really needed is a setting in Firefox that does this automatically. Plus an option to remove all urls that are more than somedomain.com, ie, automatically delete somedomain.com/other/stuff.html?asdfasdf.
And how about a list of most preferred domains?
I've never created a Firefox extension, or bookmarklet, but am tempted to do this.
Attention experienced extension/bookmarklet makers: is this doable? How would it be done?
RelativeRon
@MttFrog13: and this still isn't a good solution because they still have to be bookmarks. What about your history?
MttFrog13
Firefox's autofill is ridiculous. I use enter selects and the omnibar extension. Chrome has a really good location bar.
MttFrog13
So does this mean you could also hide certain bookmarks by prepending www?
valadil
A better solution: bookmark the page you want and add a keyword to the bookmark.
Of course, this assumes that you are always going to the same page as opposed to wanting to look up the site in your recent history.
But it's really much faster -- if I wanted to go to my personal Yahoo! Pipes page for instance, I've assigned a keyword, so I just type:
mypipes
[Enter]
and I'm there.
Now if only it was easier to add a keyword, instead of having to go into Organize Bookmarks, find the thing, and click More...
ejoy
Too funny -- my employer's site is set up so that it only works with the "www" -- I find this hilarious for some reason.
jkrell
@jkrell: ctrl l - >'fa' -> down arrow -> enter == facebook.com
He must have something making his FF not work properly
pvcrisp
@freddybob: Granted that it's usually the unprofessional poorly designed sites that do that, it shouldn't be an issue, but yes, I've encountered this also very recently.
Yuliya Gorlina
Umm... crazy question here... but if he's going to these sites enough that it's a problem, why isn't he just bookmarking them?
Also, maybe it's just that I'm a fast typer but typing "facebook" and hitting CTRL-ENTER (to prepend "www." and append ".com") seems faster to me than relying on typing a few letters and then selecting from the autofill.
Jack
@Harrison: I can't think of another tagline: same here. Why bother typing extra? I always laugh when some high-profile site gives a 404 on a correct URI, such as lloydstsb.com.
LethAL
People still use www? I haven't used it in years, unless a site doesn't work without it. Which is possibly the dumbest way to set up a site.
This is a bad idea.
somesite.com is not the same as www.somesite.com
Many sites do not have the non-www version of their domains set-up.
freddybob
A little outdated but: [no-www.org]
I wonder wy ppl still use the www. subdomain?
:)
@[www.open.ac.uk]) don't have the non-www forwarding correctly set up. Very annoying...
Or, you know, upgrade to Firefox 3 with the AwesomeBar.
QamraNoppity
@QamraNoppity: I was going to say, "um, my Firefox already finds my bookmarks without having to remove the 'www.'," but I didn't realize it was because I upgraded. Now I know. Heh.
Christopher Joseph Graves
Open DNS ([www.opendns.com]) is great stuff. its much faster at resolving DNS then my experience with Charter and it lets you set shortcuts for any website you want. Lots more features as well, check it out!
hantran
"which Facebook's autofill feature wanted him to type in a few w keys for ... "
You mean "Firefox", not "Facebook", here. These typographical errors which appear in a lot of Gawker sites are an embarrassment for a professional blog. You should be hiring a proofreading editor if your authors can't catch these [I'd be happy to be considered for the position - ;)].