Why did the location bar autocomplete suddenly change my top site?
Typically autocomplete will fill in URLs with my most visited sites, so when I type "a" for example, I can just immediately hit enter and it will take me to my most visited a- site. Starting today, the autocomplete behavior has changed to point to amazon.com as the top entry, even though my browsing habits haven't changed (and I haven't even been to Amazon in a few weeks). This is annoying, since my default habit is to just type "a" and quickly hit enter, so when I end up at the wrong place it's jarring.
I've tried selecting the Amazon URL from the drop down menu and doing Shift + Delete as recommended by the knowledge base page for the awesome bar, but although that seems to remove amazon.com from the recent history, it doesn't affect the autocomplete behavior at all. I don't want to sound like a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but is this a permanent change Amazon paid for so I'll just have to learn to add another key stroke, or can this be fixed?
All Replies (2)
Firefox has a short built-in list of popular sites to suggest when you have no history at all (source file), but I think your history is used if you have any.
So I have no idea why Amazon is showing up if you have a site you visit more frequently and/or more recently. As a temporary workaround until that is sorted out, two ideas:
(1) Can you type two letters from your preferred site name and see whether that gives you a reliable match?
(2) Firefox also has a feature called a keyword that you could use. You create a bookmark to the address you want to go to, then:
Once a site is bookmarked, you can right-click the bookmark on the menu/toolbar and click Properties. This gives you a multi-line dialog where one of the fields is keyword. For example, let's say you want to set f as the keyword for Facebook. You type f in the keyword field and click Save.
I don't know whether Firefox then will show the site as the "autofill" domain in the address bar itself when you type f, but typing f and pressing Return should load the bookmark associated with that keyword.
Note that Firefox can show the Visit Count column in the History Manager (Library; Show All History). See "Views > Show Columns" in the Library. You can sort by this "Visit Count" column to see what websites you have visited most. Type a common character like a colon (:) in the history search bar.