One more thing to add. Even if I press the right arrow key to go to the end of the highlighted string and hit enter, it still only considers the keys I actually typed. This is doubly confusing because pressing the right arrow removes the highlight from the completion string, so it _looks_ like I typed the whole string. You can see that in the second example from the video linked above.

That's very odd because the top line of the drop-down clearly shows Firefox intends to navigate to nytimes.com.

Any chance one of your extensions could be the culprit? You can view, disable, and often remove unwanted or unknown extensions on the Add-ons page. Either:

• Ctrl+Shift+a (Mac: Command+Shift+a)
• "3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons
• type or paste about:addons in the address bar and press Enter/Return

In the left column of the Add-ons page, click Extensions.

Then cast a critical eye over the list on the right side. Any extensions Firefox installs for built-in features are hidden from this page, so everything listed here is your choice (and your responsibility) to manage. Anything that seems related to outbound connections, address bar, search, or the "omnibox"? Anything you just do not remember installing or why? If in doubt, disable (or remove).

Any improvement?

Thanks for the suggestions, but it didn't help. I forgot to mention in my original post that I had tried starting the browser in "Safe Mode" to see if that would help, and I believe that mode disables all extensions. "Safe Mode" didn't seem to make any difference.

After reading those suggestions, I tried manually disabling. my extensions from the about:addons page. I disabled all except for "Firefox Multiaccount Containers" and restarted firefox, but that didn't help either.

Everything I've tried so far has had the same behavior: the url bar is populated with a highlighted completion after I type a few characters, but the browser only considers the few characters I've typed in when I press <enter>.

p.s. Another, possibly related issue is that pressing <enter> in a form text box (like the one I'm typing in now) seems to trigger a form submit instead of inserting a newline. I actually copied and pasted a newline from above in order to get paragraphs in this post. I don't know if this is related to the urlbar issue or not, but it seems like an extra data point.

After you type ny, is there any difference if you click the right-arrow button at the end of the address bar instead of pressing Enter?

Is address bar searching still enabled? That shouldn't be needed, but just in case there is some odd new interaction:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button accepting the risk.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste keyw and pause while the list is filtered

(3) If the keyword.enabled preference is bolded and set to false, double-click it to restore the default value of true

Address bar searching is still enabled. The keyword.enabled preference was set to 'true'.

If I type 'ny' into the url bar and click the right arrow that shows up at the end of the bar, I _am_ taken to the New York Times website as I expect. So it seems like just hitting <enter> does not follow the auto-suggestion, but the right arrow does.

Okay, this is very puzzling because you would expect submitting ny to:

• Go to the site listed next to Visit (autofill suggestion)
• As a fallback, send what you typed to your search site (keyword service)
• If the keyword service is disabled, try a fixup using www. before and .com after what you typed

So somehow both the first normal and first fallback behavior are getting skipped only for the Enter key.

What is special about the Enter key in your Firefox address bar?!

Did this problem just start with the latest update?

Actually, what Firefox is doing matches what happens when you hold down the Ctrl key and press Enter -- at least on Windows. So perhaps Firefox is a bit confused about the state of your Ctrl key. If you haven't restarted your system since this problem began, you might try that at some point and see whether Firefox can detect the Ctrl key (or lack thereof) normally after a reboot.

Ok then, I think I know what's wrong. I indeed do have a unique setup on my <enter> key. I've remapped it so that it registers as a normal <enter> when it's pressed, but as a <ctrl> when it's held down for longer than 500ms using xcape and xmodmap (this makes using my text editor of choice, Emacs, a lot easier on my wrists).

I haven't run into issues with any other apps, but I've tried to use Firefox off and on for the past few years, but this has always been an issue, and now I know why. Firefox seems to recognize the <enter> keypress as <ctrl> + <enter> because of my remapping. It could be that all the other apps I use treat <enter> and <ctrl> + <enter> the same, and this is the reason that I'm first running into it. The solution here might just be to bump up the timeout from 500ms to a second or more.

But, if that doesn't solve it, is there a way to remap those keybindings so that <ctrl> + <enter> behaves just like normal <enter> does?

In any case, thanks a lot for the clues. It really helped me figure out the issue.

ben said

But, if that doesn't solve it, is there a way to remap those keybindings so that <ctrl> + <enter> behaves just like normal <enter> does?

It took me a while to find this setting:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button accepting the risk.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste CTRL and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the browser.urlbar.ctrlCanonizesURLs preference to switch the value from true to false

Hopefully that will do it.

That worked! Thanks so much for your help!