[kebert]

regarding your first point, I believe you can make the address bar behave like you want simply by Edit->Preferences->Uncheck 'Provide Search Suggestions' and removing a result from your address bar results with shift-delete might also be what you're missing

[joveian]

Thanks for the suggestions. Unchecking 'Provide Search Suggestions' didn't help and I already had 'Show search suggestions in address bar results' unchecked. Shift-delete didn't help either. I made a somewhat longer reply to the sibbling comment of your comment but it turned out I did have a sub-page of washingtonpost.com.co bookmarked and for some reason it was just completing to the domain name and not showing the star. Deleting that fixed the problem. I also found browser.urlbar.autoFill to make it stop changing what I type. So yay firefox configurability.