How to prevent Firefox converting 'localhost/*' URLs into search queries?

Question

Since upgrading from Firefox 3.6.x, my address bar has a quirk that never used to be there. When I type in, for example:

localhost/my_dir/index.php

Firefox turns it into a search query, my search engine is Google. To work around this (after forgetting I need to do this almost every time for FF), I must type in:

http://localhost/my_dir/index.php

This way, I am directed correctly to my localhost server. I don't need to do this for any other browser, and I thought this Q/A on URL trimming might change the behaviour, but it didn't.

Any ideas on how I can prevent 'localhost' from being turned into a search query?

Answer 1

1. Type about:config in the URL bar
2. In the filter search box, type browser.fixup.alternate.suffix
3. Double click this entry to edit it and remove: .com

Now your localhost files should work without having to add http://.

Answer 2

1. In the Location bar, type about:config and press Enter.

2. The about:config "This might void your warranty!" warning page may appear. Click I'll be careful, I promise!, to continue to the about:config page.

3. In the Search field, type keyword.enabled.Double-click the keyword.enabled preference to set its value to false.

Please note that this will also prevent things that aren't URL-like from being used as search terms. For example, after making this change, if you type "how to tell if an egg is boiled" in the search bar, you'll just get a DNS error.

Other answers on this page give a way to attempt your suffix-less server name without modification (let's say you have a server in your domain called git, when you type just git/ and there is a DNS problem, instead of navigating to www.git.com you'll just get a DNS error page).

solution from Mozilla

Answer 3

I know this is kind of a weird solution, but you could map localhost.com to 127.0.0.1 with your %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file.

Start notepad as administrator (by using the context menu on-top of it in the Start menu) and open the file %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts, then add an entry like this:

127.0.0.1 localhost.com

to the end of the file. Save. Now you should be able to use localhost.com in place of localhost, which Firefox shouldn't complain about. Note that this works for practically any domain name you want, so you can make it shorter.

Answer 4

After trying the solutions already posted the problem was still occurring in my environment. A Google search directed to https://cdivilly.wordpress.com/2013/08/15/disable-firefox-redirecting-to-localhost-com/

This blog post suggested changing the browser.fixup.alternate.enabled property to false. This did the trick for me.

Answer 5

To avoid this problem, I configured Firefox to always show the http:// protocol in URL bar.

In about:config, set browser.urlbar.trimURLs to false (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/881261).

Answer 6

As said here:

1. Type about:config in the URL bar,
2. Create boolean parameter browser.fixup.domainwhitelist.domain_name (replace domain_name with your local domain name, like localhost),
3. Set new parameter's value to true.

Answer 7

If you still want to be able to search from the address bar, but you also want to be able to open local URLs, you can set the about:config property browser.fixup.dns_first_for_single_words to true, which will do a DNS query for single words like localhost or myserver and only turn it into a search if the DNS query fails.

This gives you the best of both worlds - you can still search from the address bar, but if you put in the name of a machine on your LAN, then you'll just connect to that instead (assuming your DNS or hosts file is set up correctly of course!)