How to Disable the Fancy New Mozilla Firefox 75 Address Bar and Restore the Old Address Bar
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And last but not least, the address bar also displays your top sites, technically making it a bit more convenient to connect to the sites that you visit on a regular basis.
“With a single click in the address bar, you’ve got access to your most visited sites. And if by chance you have that site already opened in another tab but can’t find it, we’ve highlighted a text shortcut next to it (in teal!) so you can easily jump to that tab rather than going through the gazillion tabs you already have open. This also works for any page you’ve searched, and may not realize you’ve already opened it,” Mozilla says.
Mozilla says the new Firefox 75 address bar has been improved to look larger in all devices. improved the address bar in three different ways. The updated address bar also features shorter URLs plus shortcuts to the most popular sites to search. Websites like Google and Amazon are available directly in the new address bar. If you use the new address bar to perform a search, it gives a shortcut. The new address bar also displays popular keyword suggestions in bold as you type. Theoretically, this should help you narrow your search and find exactly the thing you’re looking for.
Mozilla says that new address bar powers what it calls “smarter searches.” However, majority of Firefox users baring a few took offense at this design change. This is actually one of the reasons so many people are looking into ways to revert to the original simpler address bar.
Here is how do you return to the old look and feel of the address bar in the new Firefox 75
Disabling the new fancy address bar is very easy. You just have to enter the configuration of Firefox and disable some flags in the browser to disable the new address bar. Enter the configuration screen in Firefox by typing the following command in the address bar:
about:config
Next, you will have to find 4 settings and disable them. The new address bar has set these four settings to be a true value, which means they are enabled. Disable them by clicking the toggle next to them to set them to false.
browser.urlbar.openViewOnFocus
browser.urlbar.update1
browser.urlbar.update1.interventions
browser.urlbar.update1.searchTips
Remember, you need to find all these four strings one by one and switch them to false to disable the new address bar. Once you are done, reboot the browser to save your settings. Voila, your favorite old address bar is now available in Firefox 75.
If you want to enable the new address bar feature at some point in the future, you have to just turn on the above strings into true and reboot your browser.