Fix URL Autofill

[orc4hire]

Currently autocomplete prioritizes arbitrary URLs over actual history and bookmarks. For example, if 'youtube.com/feed/subscriptions' is bookmarked and in history, and the top level 'youtube.com' is not, typing 'you' or something similar will autocomplete 'youtube.com' instead of the actual desired URL, requiring the user to arrow down through the suggestions to select what should have already been filled in.

(Yes, Safari has the same broken behavior. That's why my default browser is Chrome which, for all its faults, at least works properly and respects the user's choices.)

[Jon]

Hey @orc4hire, 

This option should already be available:

• In preferences, go to the search section and look for "Search Suggestions"
• In that section uncheck "Show search suggestions ahead of browsing history in address bar results".

That should put history & bookmarks ahead of search suggestions.

Hope this helps! And if that's not what you're looking for, let us know.

[orc4hire]

Turning off Search Suggestions does not change the behavior.

[EnduringGuerila]

I have the same issue with 'face' (my request here)

[Anonymous]

• Open about:config
• Look up browser.urlbar.autoFill.adaptiveHistory.enabled and set it to true

[ejrt]

I specifically joined the Mozilla Support community just to find a topic about this and upvote it. I switched from Chrome about two years ago when I got my new computer, and my ONE recurring source of regret is the fact that the Firefox address bar autocomplete is just so bad. It's hard to put my finger on exactly why, but the upshot was that while Chrome gave me what I was looking for in my Bookmarks/History 90% of the time, Firefox is delivering that only about 30% of the time.

A simple attempt typing "test" illustrates the problem: the second-billed result is a Quickbooks Online login URL that I visited exactly once, months ago, where "test" appears only as one of the many URL parameters following ".com". This result appears above multiple bookmarks with "Test" in the title and/or the actual URL, including several that don't even make the visible autocomplete results.

I've already removed Google Search autocomplete results to give Firefox more chances to show me the URL I'm looking for (which is a bummer, because I would have wanted to keep seeing at least a few search autocompletes), and just now I've also made the config suggested by Anonymous above -- so we'll see if that helps.

But it should just work, like it does on Chrome! We have the technology! Firefox, please make autocomplete smarter. Thank you!

[Torkal]

Similar to @ejrt, I joined this community specifically to talk about how awful Firefox's URL autocomplete is. The example I keep running into is sheets.google.com, which for some reason never autocompletes at all. I even added this URL to my bookmarks and still it doesn't autocomplete, despite showing up at the bottom of the 'Firefox suggest' list. A similar thing occurs with desmos.com/calculator, a website that I not only frequent but also added to my bookmarks. Despite both of these facts, the autocomplete still only fills in the base website desmos.com.

I understand that these are ridiculously minor complaints, but after switching from a browser that flawlessly handled autocompletes (Chrome), it's little things like this that make me regret switching and dissuade me from recommending Firefox.

[J-M]

Longtime Firefox user here. I did notice a change in how URL autofill behaves for some sites I frequently access, now suggesting very rarely accessed sites, which is silly indeed. I think it happened some time this year, though I can't be certain.

So I wonder, could it be that Firefox changed its algorithm? Or could it be that some stored DB got corrupted?

I tried having a look at places.sqlite (on Linux, with sqlitebrowser), and I half expected to find garbled values, but the visit counts seemed reasonable. Anything else I could check? Is there any way I could tweak the results (e.g. with sqlitebrowser again) ?

[jungleh]

Adding my complaint to the list.

I always have an open tab for gmail, and I use google maps a lot. On Chrome, I was able to go to maps by typing "m". On Firefox, it autocompletes to mail.google.com. I have to type "map" for it to realize what I want.

I tried following the solution found here, to delete mail.google.com from history, but I see that it's all over my history, clearly added every time I go check my email by switching to that tab. I only actually typed mail.google.com once. So deleting history is not going to fix the issue.

The "browsing history" option in the Address Bar suggestion setting should not be based on the general navigation history but on the address bar typing history. It could be fixed by adding a flag to each history entry to mark the entries that were typed versus the ones that come from switching to an already open tab or from clicking on a link, and using only those to feed the autocomplete feature.

[VireV]

Hi, I'd like to request this as well. While browser.urlbar.autoFill does autofill very well (especially with browser.urlbar.autoFill.adaptiveHistory.enabled), it only works for URLs. If a page does not include the page title in it's URL then the autofill won't pick it up. For example, "gmail" doesn't work for mail.google.com whereas "mail" will.

Would it be possible to make the autofill support page titles in addition to URLs? It's quite an issue that this feature doesn't support some very common websites.

Thank you :)))

[VireV]

@VireV Or, well, any other method of finding the site name would work fine. It doesn't necessarily have to be from the page title.

That said, thank you again for reading 🙂