Clear drop-down history of Firefox

Question

1. I was wondering how to clear the following privacy in Firefox 3.6.16:

   • when typing address in the address bar, the history meeting the partial typing provided by auto-completion.
   • without doing anything, the drop-down list of addresses in address bar

   
   Is it possible to just clear the former without clearing the latter, and without actually clearing the history i.e. you can still get the history by clicking History->Show All History?

2. What is the general strategy of protecting one's own privacy, while keeping the history as much as possible? My case is using Firefox on my personal laptop, which will occasionally be used by others under my account, for example, to help me solve some problems by typing some webpage address and visiting them in Firefox.

Operating systems are Windows 7 & Ubuntu 10.10

Answer 1

In Preferences, on the Privacy tab, there is a settings called When using the location bar, suggest:. Setting it to Nothing appears to affect both actions you mentioned: auto-complete while typing, and click the drop-down arrow. I don't think those two can be separated.