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by cambrianentropy 1562 days ago
I had the exact same problem! There is no configuration option to change this, and I literally kept using Chromium based browsers for years because of this.

This workaround isn't perfect, but it has allowed me to switch:

  - Bookmark the url
  - Go to Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks > [location of your bookmark]
  - In the keywords section, put the first two or three characters (I settled on three) of the domain, so 'hac' in this case
Now when you start typing in the domain and you type those first two or three characters (or however many you want to setup), the first suggestion from firefox will be your keyworded bookmark and you can just hit enter instead of having to hit down!

Crazy how Firefox always defaults to the domain instead of the most frequently visited URL for the characters typed in, but this has worked for me.

1 comments

This is intriguing -- can you explain your preference setup a bit more to get this behavior?

I was not able to get this to work on my setup. I added a keyword 'uniquekeyword' to the hackaday bookmark, but if I start typing uni... it just tries to give me a web search. I tried enabling/disabling the search bar and messing with my address bar preferences but no dice.

Counter-intuitively, it does sort of work if I put the keyword as a tag. It still tries to offer me a search as the top hit, but the tag result is the second hit.

Hmm, not sure what else you would need.

When searching for a setting to make Firefox work like Chrome, I had found this a while back: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1223611

I basically did what was suggested there. (The 2-3 character length I suggested was just from my experience of avoiding collisions with other urls I might visit and was when I wanted to hit return when I started typing.)

Not sure if these settings matter or not. I just tried disabling a few and it doesn't seem to make a difference These are the only ones that seem relevant.

In about:preferences#search I have this enabled:

  -  Provide search suggestions
  -  Show search suggestions in address bar results
In about:preferences#privacy I have this enabled (plus a few other things):

  -  Bookmarks
Thanks so much for this. I confirmed that this works on a virgin firefox install, and was able to get it working on my config after messing with the search settings to enable search suggestions.

The key here is that if firefox sees an exact match to a bookmark keyword, it will put that as the top hit on the address bar. So if you put a short keyword for your bookmark (in this case, ha for the aforementioned hackaday example) you can type in h a {enter} and it will take you to the full url of the bookmark instead of the base.