I love Firefox but I hate the AwesomeBar. As of Firefox 3, Mozilla stuck in a new feature of which I feel is a total privacy concern that can lead to embarrassment. It is such as controversial feature that I want to let Firefox users know how to turn it off.
The AwesomeBar is the url bar you type into. That is, the area where you specify the url address to surf to. Unlike other browsers, as you begin to type the internet address of the location you want to surf to, Firefox will do a keyword search of your existing bookmarks and history.
As you type, a drop down appears showing you results based on high frequency those websites that you have visited. Now what is so bad about this?
The problem is that Firefox tracks your history. Every website you visit is tracked and stored. So if you go to websites you shouldn't really be visiting, those URLs are tracked and stored. Now the embarrassing part of all of this is that if someone accesses your computer to do a little surfing and starts to type in the bar, all those sites that you shouldn't have visited start showing up in the address bar. Embarrassing to say the least.
Now one can go and hit the delete button on the URLs in attempt to remove them. You can even go and flush the cache, delete the cookies, and clear the history. But you know what? It won't work. The AwesomeBar will continue to drop down suggestions! I'm not one to be paraonoid but that to me is a potential privacy issue because the URLs are being stored somewhere.
So how do you turn off this feature?
Type this in the address bar:
about:config
Up will come the configuration settings for Firefox. Next, type in the filter "browser.urlbar.maxRichResults". Click in the "value" column and set the value to 0.
Now try typing in the AwesomeBar again and you will see that it will no longer drop down.
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