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When I type "http://something" in the Firefox url bar and Firefox can't resolve I get automatically redirected to "http://www.something.com/".
It even does this when I never visited something.com before, so it's not the auto complete feature that causes this.
I tried setting "browser.urlbar.unifiedcomplete" to "false", but that doesn't change the behavior.
Is there any way to disable this?
I'd like to get a "DNS not found error" or something like that instead.
PS: When clicking the url to http://something in this question the error page comes up, it's only when manually typing in the url that Firefox does the automatic tld completion.
Jens Mühlenhoff
Posted 2016-03-30T12:09:12.377
Reputation: 347
I can't get this to work. I.e., I set
browser.fixup.alternative.enableto false and firefox 51.0.1 still insists upon prepending www to my URL. – pgoetz – 2017-02-13T12:05:00.083Still works here (Version 52.0b4), are you sure you're not just getting redirected by the server? – Jens Mühlenhoff – 2017-02-13T13:20:21.167
100% sure. The request is never getting to the server, which in any case does not have a host or DNS www alias. I think the problem is that the host name I'm trying to reach (a test machine on my private local network) isn't DNS resolvable (I thought /etc/hosts would suffice), in which case firefox appears to ignore the browser.fixup.alternative.enable parameter. I'm going to test this hypothesis now by making the local host resolve in DNS. Also, I'm running firefox on linux; maybe the linux version is buggy. – pgoetz – 2017-02-15T09:10:47.157
I had a problem with case sensitive DNS, the DNS server (our router) was only resolving the exact case that was entered, but I was trying to enter the DNS name in lower case. Everything was tested from a Windows Firefox. – Jens Mühlenhoff – 2017-02-15T15:40:01.683
The
www.prefix or.comsuffix are what thebrowser.fixup.alternativefunction usually adds though (you can see that with the otherbrowser.fixup.alternative.*settings. – Jens Mühlenhoff – 2017-02-15T15:40:24.337Here's the strange (still inexplicable) thing I discovered: If I use a URL involving a host which actually does not exist, firefox does not attempt to prepend www. to the URL. However, in trying to connect to an actual host which did resolve against my DNS server (hobo.mycom.com), it would always prepend www. to both the hostname and the IP address; i..e if I used 192.168.1.11 as the URL, firefox make it www.192.168.1.11 and complain that the host didn't exist. But this was only happening for a hostname which actually did exist. Guessing it has to do with the lib func for name resolution. – pgoetz – 2017-02-16T16:23:14.613
You probably already know that, but on Linux there is the
hostcommand to check if (and to what) something resolves. Aside from DNS there is also rDNS (reverse DNS resolution) to take into account. – Jens Mühlenhoff – 2017-02-16T16:46:55.357Yes. So to be explicit. I had a webserver running on hobo.mycom.com with IP address 192.168.1.11. From my workstation I type
host hobo.mycom.comand it resolves to 192.168.1.11. I then enter the URL hobo.mycom.com in firefox and hit <Enter> and it turns it into www.hobo.mycom.com and says "Server not found". The same thing happens with Chrome and firefox on Windows. I enter doesnotexist.foo.com instead it leaves it as doesnotexist.foo.com and says server not found but doesn't prepend the www. – pgoetz – 2017-02-16T16:56:48.440"Had" because I finally got fed up and moved the machine to an independent subnet (192.168.2.0/24), put it in a different domain where I could call it www.mycom2.com, and configured the domain under my DNS server. With no modifications to anything other than the IP address, the web server now works perfectly. – pgoetz – 2017-02-16T16:58:33.117
I didn't configure the rDNS part of this, but am not sure how this would be relevant, since you're mostly looking to map hostnames to IP addresses. – pgoetz – 2017-02-16T17:02:02.903
Forgot to add that I also had to change the apache VirtualHost Servername/ServerAlias of course. – pgoetz – 2017-02-16T17:06:36.540