When you start typing something in the Firefox address bar (also called location bar), it starts to show you suggestions matched to your typed words. These suggestions are taken from your web browsing history and from the webpages that you have bookmarked. For example, if you type “sports” in the location bar then it might show the Sports Illustrated website that you have bookmarked or the New York Times sports page that you have visited earlier. In general, this is very useful for everyone as you can quickly find out a desired webpage, but sometimes it can also become very embarrassing if you have visited questionable websites before and it shows up in the suggestions list when your friends or family members use Firefox.
If you do not want anyone to accidentally find out your web browsing history or the pages bookmarked, just by typing a keyword in the Firefox location bar, then you can disable the suggestions shown in the Firefox location bar. Here is how:
- Open Mozilla Firefox browser in your PC.
- Press the Alt key once on your keyboard to make the menubar visible. If you press the Alt key once again, the menubar shall disappear – so press the key only one time.
- Select Tools → Options from the menubar in Firefox to open the Options window.
- In the Options window, switch to the Privacy tab.
- In the Privacy tab, you will find Location bar section where you can select what type of suggestions should be shown in the Firefox location bar. You can choose to display suggestions from both history and bookmarks, only one of them or display no suggestion.
- Click on the OK button to save the settings.
Conclusion: You can disable the Firefox location bar suggestions if you feel a little uncomfortable exposing your web browsing history to others through the suggestions feature. You can also customize the suggestions to appear only from bookmarks and a void the history altogether.