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The last few releases of Firefox (and Mozilla) have grown an annoying habit called Domain Guessing. If you enter a domain name that can't be found firefox will attempt to guess at what you mean. In reality this means that if you enter a word into the address bar a www. will be placed before it and a .com after it. This is all well and good if that is what you want but under some situations this is very annoying behaviour. The most annoying situation is when you are developing a website that you want to refer to by it's local machine name but the local server is down. If the machine name happens to coincide with a registered domain name you are taken to the domain rather than being shown a 404. So, for instance, if your machine is called example you get a lovely little trip to www.example.com everytime your server isn't running.
A related "problem" is keyword search. If Firefox guesses that the text you entered into the address bar is not a domain name it instead sends it to your preferred search engine (Google) and redirects you to the first result. This potentially exposes private information and can lead to a great deal of confusion.
Solution to Domain Guessing
- Open a new tab.
- Enter "about:config" into the address bar (don't include http://).
- In the filter field at the top enter: "fixup".
- Flip "browser.fixup.alternate.enabled" to false by double clicking on it.
Solution to Keyword Search
- Open a new tab.
- Enter "about:config" into the address bar (don't include http://).
- In the filter field at the top enter: "keyword".
- Flip "keyword.enabled" to false by double clicking on it.