Prevent firefox from converting characters to percentage format in address bar

Question

I sometimes use archive.org to find the contents that are no longer available in their addresses. I've bookmarked the http://web.archive.org/web/*/%s and use a keyword to search faster. (see this)

The problem is when I try to search for a URL with some characters like / included. after I hitting Enter the URL convert to percentage format and then search query won't work.

For exp. I try keyword superuser.com/questions then it will convert to http://web.archive.org/web/*/superuser.com%2Fquestions and because of %2F which should be / the page stops from loading and I should manually change the URL to http://web.archive.org/web/*/superuser.com/questions.

Is there a way to prevent FF from doing this?

Answer 1

You can't prevent this that I can see, but you can get around it. The form on the archive.org page does a bit of monkeying around with the submission to make it come out like that, to make it search and human friendly. However from inspecting the page, if javascript is disabled, it uses a more traditional form and url.

Here is the keyword search that will work:

http://web.archive.org/form-submit.jsp?type=urlquery&url=%s

Because the url is passed as a parameter, rather than part of the url, it doesn't matter that it is converted to percentage format internally. In fact, it has to.