interesting - i didn’t fully realize the agenda here, other than being aware that it’s a privacy/security issue where one could unintentionally send private data (passwords, etc.) to a search engine, thus i have always advised people in my Firefox privacy guides to enable the search bar rather than using only the “awesome” bar (address bar)
Firefox hasn’t played this game (yet); you still have a separate search bar …
yeah, but it’s disabled by default
the relevant pref here is browser.urlbar.showSearchTerms.enabled and you want to set it to ‘false’
someone correct me if i’m wrong, but looks like the geniuses at Mozilla just removed that setting from the settings UI (v137 here) ???
privacy geeks may also want to check out either the arkenfox or LibreWolf projects, the latter being the easiest to use and it pulls a lot of its defaults from the arkenfox project
Since transitioning to Wayland, my desktop clipboard has been unreliable. I mention it because I’m glad I turned off search suggestions in my browsers. That is, sometimes I can’t be sure of what I’m pasting, and the search suggestions preference in browsers automatically sends whatever is in the address bar or search field to the default search engine. So, I think that turning off search suggestions gives me a little more privacy.
Sorry, SuSE is still on Firefox v. 136. So, I’m not able to check that preference for you.
I wonder how much they were leaned on, by you know who, for that?
Also interesting to explore which of the forks have it off by default. And whether Vivaldi has it off by default. Despite being Chromium based they have plugged back in some credit to them.
Upon creating a new Vivaldi profile, I am presented with the setup wizard. But, creating a search bar is not part of the setup routine. And, the first‑run ends up with an omnibar.
My guess is that the Vivaldi team did not want to overwhelm new users or to give new users an unfamiliar experience.
Backing up a bit, Vivaldi does have a direct match feature which is enabled by default. And, the Proton VPN extension is automatically installed if you click on the large “VPN” button in the toolbar. So, Vivaldi has an audience and they’re selling advertising to that audience. But, they deserve some criticism for blurring the line between advertising and traditional features like browsing or searching.
I still have not quite figured out how to avoid example.com being turned into example.com/some-page-i-visited after their recent changes to the address bar. Aggressive autocomplete wasn’t a problem before that update. Specifically, typing example.com and pressing Enter now navigates to the first suggestion under the address bar rather than simply navigating to example.com
thanks @mike. I can’t honestly remember if I was presented with the option when I set it up maybe 4+ years ago. Significant if not most money, I believe, comes from search engine default deals. So as for Apple-Google. So they too have an interest in suppressing it too. And Mozilla too
