acatalept/blog

The new Location bar in Firefox 3.x will, by default, take any non-URL input and:

1. If it's a single word (no spaces): first attempt to prepend "www.", and/or append ".com", then lookup in OpenDNS to see if this makes a valid server name - if so, you are automatically redirected to this found server
2. If there is a space: it is assumed this is a search phrase, so the the input is passed (by default) to Google's Browse By Name service. This works similarly to a standard Google web search, however if the search phrase is associated with an "authoritative" server (as deemed by Google), you are automatically redirected to this server (similar to an I'm Feeling Lucky search).

To disable these behaviors, resulting in similar functionality to Google Chrome's address bar, just make a couple changes in Firefox's hidden about:config settings (that is, type "about:config" in the address bar and hit Enter):

1. Change the value of "browser.fixup.alternate.enabled" to false
2. Change the value of "keyword.URL" to

   http://www.google.com/search?q=

   Note that there is nothing after the equal sign.

This appears to work up through Firefox 3.5b4.