patrickburke.de

I’m using Google’s Chrome browser for quite some time now, and one of my favorite features is the auto-completion inside the address bar.

For those not familiar with it: If you type “face” in the address bar, Chrome completes it with “book.com”, and by pressing enter, http://www.facebook.com is opened by Chrome. For that completion, Chrome uses terms which were typed in there previously by you.

Today I installed the latest beta of Firefox 4 (Beta 12), which is laking this extremely awesome feature.

I googled several hours to find an extension which enables that feature. The solution I found was the “browser.urlbar.autoFill” about:config setting of Firefox. With default settings, you have to type the visited URL of the website you want to open. Thus, you have to type “http://www.face” to get the completion for “http://www.facebook.com”, which is rather impractical. But by setting the “browser.urlbar.default.behavior” setting (also found under about:config) to “32″, Firefox restricts the completion to terms typed in previously by the user, just like our old pal Chrome. A reference of the available values for this option can be found on the mozillaZine sites.

browser.urlbar.autoFill = true
browser.urlbar.default.behavior = 32

Now, our little fox turns up completing “face” with “book.com”, thus perfectly recreating Chrome’s behaviour.

In order to replicate the search- in address bar feature, you can install the Omnibar Add-On for Firefox, it’s small and does it’s job.