Firefox Inline Autocomplete

Memo to myself:

To turn on inline autocomplete in the Firefox web browser…

  1. Enter about:config in the URL field
  2. Right-click on the page and create a new Boolean value
  3. Enter browser.urlbar.autoFill as the preference name (note, case-sensitive: ‘F’, not ‘f’)
  4. Set the value to true

There. Maybe next time I won’t have to Google for it again.

Stumble It!
Firefox Inline Autocomplete

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39 Comments

  1. Hal Rottenberg halr9000.com
    Posted December 16, 2004 at 8:24 am | Permalink

    thx for the tip dougal

  2. Jared MacKenzie remenissions.org
    Posted December 17, 2004 at 1:22 pm | Permalink

    Thanks Dougal, something that I was missing in my firefox adventures ;)

  3. Posted December 30, 2004 at 10:40 am | Permalink

    Thank you for this boolean instruction. It was annoying that the great Firefox didn’t have this feature. I can’t believe I didn’t do a Google search until now to try and add it.

  4. Posted January 3, 2005 at 4:52 am | Permalink

    Oh man… Just like someone else said: inline autocomplete was the ONLY thing I was missing from IE. Missing so much that I actually was going to stick with IE because of the time, typing, and clicking it saved me. Not anymore. Thanks dude!

  5. Posted January 9, 2005 at 7:26 pm | Permalink

    How do I delete items from my auto complete lists? Lists are getting too long.

  6. Posted January 13, 2005 at 9:24 pm | Permalink

    Are we talking about autocomplete in web fields e.g. search boxes, address fields, etc.? I also would like to delete. In IE you can arrow down and just hit delete.

  7. Posted January 13, 2005 at 9:32 pm | Permalink

    I solved my own question–it’s SHIFT + DELETE. Now I can delete all my porn searches. This site is helpful. http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/s2s/latest/jaws1/src/hotkeys.html

  8. Posted January 21, 2005 at 2:16 am | Permalink

    Jimmy, you’re a genius! Thanks for the url. Shift + Delete solved my biggest problem with FireFox.

  9. Posted March 10, 2005 at 4:09 am | Permalink

    Geez, that’s the reason why I stick with Mozilla, because a lot of simple but yet very usefull functions are not enabled in Firefox by default. I also think it’s ridiculous that you can not enable them besides using the cryptic about:config interface. Even in Mozilla a user can easily enable or disable autocomplete in the preferences.

  10. Posted March 10, 2005 at 5:14 am | Permalink

    It important to note here that you social security number will be stored if you use it for logging in somewhere. Unless you internet banking-provider or whatever has included an “autocomplete = “off” -tag in the htm-code.

    In other words, to prevent identity theft, autocomplete should be used with care.

    B

  11. Sir
    Posted March 24, 2005 at 2:21 am | Permalink

    Where are all the Firefox autofills saved? I know how to delete autofills from IE5 in one go, but want to know how before enabling FF.

  12. Posted March 24, 2005 at 6:03 am | Permalink

    And how do you turn this off ?
    It would be logic if you set browser.urlbar.autoFill to false, but that isn’t working here ?!
    Any tips ?

  13. Posted March 28, 2005 at 2:02 pm | Permalink

    how do you turn that damn thing off!

  14. Posted March 28, 2005 at 2:03 pm | Permalink

    how do you turn that damn thing off!

  15. Posted April 28, 2005 at 9:52 pm | Permalink
  16. Val valhala.be
    Posted May 23, 2005 at 4:15 am | Permalink

    Whow that’s just perfect, exactly what I was looking for. Thanks

  17. Posted June 4, 2005 at 3:43 am | Permalink

    >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>i figured this out myself. if you want to get rid of form fill, for things such as google searches (not for the url bar), then you need to:

    type into your url bar: about:config
    then, type in the filter bar: browser.formfill.enable
    now, double click it so the the boolean value is false

    i did this with Firefox, i’m not sure if the same will work for other browsers

  18. Posted June 6, 2005 at 1:09 am | Permalink

    This “fix” only does autofill during the same browser session. Once I close Firefox, and reopen it later, nothing autofills. Anyone having this problem?

  19. Dougal dougal.gunters.org
    Posted June 6, 2005 at 8:38 am | Permalink

    It works fine for me across browser sessions. Maybe you have some other setting that’s causing a side-effect? Maybe you have Firefox set to not save your browsing history?

  20. Posted July 31, 2005 at 2:58 pm | Permalink

    Is there anyway to enable the dropdown history list while preventing it from opening automatically? That is, you could type in your URL without seeing the history, but if you needed it, you could click on the dropdown history button and see the possible completions?

  21. Posted September 11, 2005 at 9:33 pm | Permalink

    I`ve tried to set Autocomplete to TRUE, but nothing changes? Enter about:config, then add browser.urlbar.autoFill, then set to True. Any idea why this won`t work? Thanks.

  22. RG
    Posted September 25, 2005 at 1:01 am | Permalink

    I’ve been trying to figure out how to do this. Yours is the first site that was right on. Thanks!

  23. Posted October 28, 2005 at 3:36 am | Permalink

    Is it possible to have it go to the root domain first, then the subdomains? Having it autocomplete something obscure doesn’t save time…am I doing something wrong or is that coming?

  24. Posted December 28, 2005 at 6:20 pm | Permalink

    thanks

  25. Posted August 14, 2006 at 7:06 pm | Permalink

    thanks man, lol, i used this for the reverse, the autofill was pissing me off but i couldnt figure out how to turn it off.

  26. Posted October 24, 2006 at 5:07 pm | Permalink

    Any of you knows where can I get a trick that I can use for this in firefox 2?

  27. Jim
    Posted November 1, 2006 at 1:25 pm | Permalink

    Thanks much. I just added this to FireFox 2 and it works fine.

  28. Posted December 12, 2006 at 8:01 pm | Permalink

    How do you turn OFF the autofill in FireFox? I find it very annoying that everytime I type a number it gives me 25 choices to select from when I all I want is that one number.

  29. Posted December 30, 2006 at 9:04 pm | Permalink

    Can somebody PLEASE tell me how to turn off this incredibly annoying feature. I have set everything I can find in about:config to false including the items mentioned here. I’m using Firefox 2. If I can’t get rid of this feature I am giving up on Firefox. It is *that* annoying to me. A feature that gets in my way is more annoying than three I want but don’t have because I *hate* software doing what I don’t want it to do.

  30. Posted January 22, 2007 at 5:43 pm | Permalink

    To anyone else who googled in here looking for ways to turn off the autofill in the google toolbar in Firefox 2.x. It turns out to be very simple. Right click on the tool bar (or context thingy on a Mac) and untick show suggestions. Not that you’d ever know that without trying it, of course.

  31. Posted March 10, 2007 at 2:32 pm | Permalink

    Just a quick note to say thanks for the info on the inline autocomplete, I have been meaning to sort that out for ages and thanks to you it is now working fine.
    Thanks

  32. Posted April 14, 2007 at 2:13 pm | Permalink

    Thanks, very much appreciated. I was thinking of going back to IE since it was so annoying.

  33. Posted May 21, 2007 at 7:08 pm | Permalink

    Why the inline autocomplete do not work for http://www.google.com?????
    Really!! Try it! Do not works!!
    (sorry for the bad english, i’m brazilian)

  34. Posted June 8, 2007 at 4:29 am | Permalink

    Awesome, no idea why this isn’t the default setting.

  35. Posted June 10, 2007 at 12:23 pm | Permalink

    I can’t get this to work with google.com either. It’s worked in previous versions of Firefox–could Google have changed something to prevent the autocomplete, perhaps in order to boost gmail (since that’s what I get if I just hit g)?

    MaryP

  36. Posted March 26, 2008 at 3:21 pm | Permalink

    Thanks. I can finally start using Firefox as my main browser as this was the one thing that really was really missing for me.

  37. Posted July 26, 2008 at 3:46 am | Permalink

    This works for Mac as well – Inline Autocomlete for Firefox Mac Version… Thanks you so much for this!

  38. Posted November 2, 2008 at 8:52 am | Permalink

    For those who changed urlbar.autoFill to true but still don’t see anything: make sure that urlbar.maxRichResults is not set to 0. (The default is 12, which you get by right-clicking on the setting and choosing ‘reset’).

  39. Posted January 19, 2010 at 6:12 pm | Permalink

    Thanks a lot, this helped me quite a bit during my searches.

13 Trackbacks

  1. By iThink's blog on August 28, 2005 at 1:16 pm

    按照下面的方法,Firefox可以在你输入网址时自动填补剩余部分(AutoComplete): 1.在地址栏输入about:config; 2.新建一个Boolean变量; 3.输入browser.urlbar.autoFill作为变量名; 4.将其值置为true。 (via GeekRamblings

  2. ht Idea

    Dougal has a cool tip for Firefox users

    Check out this post on Dougal’s site to find out how to enable autofill in the [...]

  3. By argus » Firefox hackery on December 15, 2004 at 1:28 pm

    n get into the guts of Firefox by merely entering about:config into the URL bar (thanks to this post, discovered by me while browsing Planet Wordpress). As that post [...]

  4. By Swirlee on December 16, 2004 at 11:34 am

    A Firefox tip

    From the “Why isn’t this enabled by default?” department, Dougal reveals that Firefox can do inline autocomplete in the URL bar. Just go to about:config, make a new Boolean value called “browser.urlbar.autoFill”, and set it to true. Gee whiz.

    L…

  5. Firefox Inline Autocomplete

    How to enable inline autocomplete in Firefox.

  6. lete for Firefox. This is the one and ONLY thing I missed when moving from IE to Firefox! geek ramblings Firefox Inline Autocomplete

    [...]

  7. By joeyDotNet.com on February 13, 2005 at 8:13 pm

    Firefox tip – Inline Autocomplete

  8. [...] uo; lucky Firefox Inline Autocomplete If you want your Firefox to guess the site you want, this is useful to you. Hat tip to Dougal Gunter [...]

  9. [...] A must have feature IMO. [...]

  10. By Tech Beat on July 13, 2005 at 5:40 pm

    Hacking Firefox

    I was about to write an item about how all the enthusiasm about Firefox seemed a bit much, given some annoying issues I’ve had with the upstart Web browser. For instance, I had grown used to Internet Explorer’s “inline autofill,”…

  11. [...] can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can also leave a response, or trackback from your ownsite. [...]

  12. By surfergeek: Attn: Firefox Fans on November 23, 2006 at 7:39 pm

    [...] Jared (surfergeek) wrote,@ 2005-05-12 15:54:00      Attn: Firefox Fans 1. If you haven’t updated your browser lately, go out to Get Firefox! and download the latest version for security updates. If haven’t downloaded it, now is a good time to start using it and move away from the legacy IE browser and all it’s security holes vulnerabilities, and tabless ways.2. Once you do that, I found a neat trick that fixes the one thing that I found myself really missing from IE. It’s a cool way to enable inline auto complete within firefox, which is pretty much the only feature from IE that I missed since I moving to firefox. Cool! check it out here: Inline AutoComplete for Firefox(Post a new comment) [...]

  13. [...] thanks to Geek Ramblings for this tip. I always went to his site to remember, but I just want to have it on my own site for [...]

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