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Firefox 75 Strips https:// and www From Address Bar Results

Like most of the modern browsers, Firefox shows suggestions when you type in the address bar. Those suggestions are based on your recent browsing history, include bookmarks, and may include search engine suggestions. The upcoming version 75 of Firefox strips the https:// and www portions from the suggestion URL.

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When explaining the change, Mozilla noted that modern browsers are already hiding these parts. The company must be referring to Google Chrome, which is a product known for introducing such changes. So, starting in Firefox 75, the browser will replicate this behavior, and hide https:// and www parts from the suggestion URL.

The current version of Firefox shows suggestions as follows:

Firefox Address Bar Suggestions With HTTPS

As you can see in the screenshot above, both https:// and www are visible next to the suggestion title.

Here is how the same looks in Firefox 75, which is in Nightly as of now.

Firefox Address Bar Suggestions Without HTTPS

While the HTTPS portion is hidden, Firefox 75 shows the protocol if the classic plain HTTP is in the URL.

As of this writing Firefox 75 'Nightly' comes with a special about:config option to disable the new behavior.

Disable New Behavior

  1. Open Firefox.
  2. In a new tab, type about:config in the address bar.
  3. Click I accept the risk.Firefox About:config Warning
  4. In the search box, type or copy-paste the line browser.urlbar.trimURLs.Firefox Browser.urlbar.trimURLs
  5. Double-click on the value name in the search result to toggle its value from true to false.Firefox Restore Classic Address Bar Suggestions

You are done. You can reset the value at any time later to restore the new behavior.

Personally, I find this change unpleasant. I am familiar with a couple of sites which return differently formatted pages for www and non-www URLs. Hiding anything from the URL is always a bad idea, because it makes it harder to understand what is going on in case you  see something that you didn't expect to see on a web page.

As of now, the actual Firefox version is 73.0.1. To learn more about changes introduces in Firefox 73, check out the following post:

Firefox 73 is available, here are the changes

Articles of interest:

References: #1, #2

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

4 thoughts on “Firefox 75 Strips https:// and www From Address Bar Results”

  1. There is also browser.urlbar.update1.view.stripHttps which you may set to false to block Firefox from stripping HTTPS.

    1. I’ve tested the params against the newly released version 75 stable. The value browser.urlbar.update1.view.stripHttps you’ve mentioned is not required to be changed.

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