Hello bwsransom,

You are not the only one who finds this "new feature" annoying
(to say the least) .....

Would you do this please :

Type in the address bar about:config and press Enter. (ignore the warning)

Type in the search bar and look for the preference :

browser.urlbar.openViewOnFocus

and set its value to false

Do the same with these preferences :

browser.urlbar.update1

browser.urlbar.update1.interventions

browser.urlbar.update1.searchTips

Then close and restart Firefox.

This may be a temporary fix (so I'm told), but I'm hoping that
they will come to their senses.

(edit : typo)

Thanks, appreciate the reply.

But I'm not a terribly advanced user, and am concerned about making changes to the back end that I do not fully understand.

Is there any risk this could brick my browser, cause unanticipated problems, or be difficult to reverse?

Frankly, I would really like for Mozilla to respond directly (you listening?) about whether they are planning on rolling out a change. For a browser that puts so much emphasis on simple functionality and customizability, FORCING this change on 100% of users seems ASININE, and has absolutely resulted in significantly reduced functionality for me personally, without ANY apparent benefit.

1) Mozilla, what in the hell were you thinking?

2) Are you planning on making this "feature" optional? (i.e. something we can remove with basic, GUI modification of the settings, rather than messing with the config file)

If not, I will probably just return to Chrome...

You can safely do as I suggested in my post; no worries.

As for the last part of your post :

The people who answer questions here are (for the main part) volunteers, users just like you, who are trying to help other users in their spare time.

If you want to, you can submit feedback using this link :

https://qsurvey.mozilla.com/s3/FirefoxInput/

The more people do that, the better .....

Cool, thanks so much man! Really appreciate the help.

bwsransom said

Cool, thanks so much man! Really appreciate the help.

My pleasure ! (I'm not a man though .... )

Would you be so kind as to mark my post (the one that solved the problem) as Chosen Solution ? It's the "Solved the problem" button to the right of that post.

(that is assuming that my post did solve your problem, of course)

Oh gosh, I'm sorry.

I only know one McCoy, and he's a boy...

(And, with a brother named Blair, I know the struggle...)

My bad. Will hit the button (although I haven't actually tried the fix.).

bwsransom said

Oh gosh, I'm sorry.

Awww, it's alright - most people assume that there are only men answering questions here.

Will hit the button (although I haven't actually tried the fix.).

Thank you ! However : if, for some weird reason, that doesn't solve your problem : please, let us know.

Just got FF77, behavior can NOT be changed as described above, always the big focus on the URLbox, nox expanding quicklinks

That's not mine FF anymore!

Just got FF77, behavior can NOT be changed as described above, always the big focus on the URLbox, nox expanding quicklinks

Hi om26, here's an update:

Enlargement effect

You can override this using style rules in a userChrome.css file. See: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1289351#answer-1318441

Auto-opening when the cursor moves into the bar

You can disable this by toggling the browser.urlbar.openViewOnFocus preference to false in about:config. If you haven't used about:config before, see: Configuration Editor for Firefox. For Firefox 78-79, use the new preference browser.urlbar.suggest.topsites instead.

Unwanted items in the top sites list

You can clean up the list on the new tab page: Customize your Firefox New Tab page. If you don't use the built-in new tab page, you can turn off the top sites list on the Options/Preferences page: Customize your New Tab page to hide or display content.

Show History button missing

You can call up the list by typing a space in the bar.

As a different workaround, I created an add-on for toolbar (outside of the drop-down): https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/show-history-top-sites-button/ -- you can reply with new feature ideas (unlike Firefox, I can make changes to this extension)