A new feature in Firefox V3 is what FF calls the ‘Smart Location Bar,’ which is a memory-component similiar to the technology some mobile phones (Blackberry) are offering—smart typing, where the phone would remember your most often typed letters & words, the browser remembers and matches your most often used bookmarks, displaying them in a drop-down menu attached to the right side of the URL/address bar.

A quick way to get to the sites you love—even the ones with addresses you only vaguely remember. The new Firefox 3 location bar learns as you use it—it’s so highly evolved that we like to call it the “Awesome Bar”. Over time, it adapts to your preferences and offers better fitting matches. Type in a term and the autocomplete function includes possible matching sites from your browsing history, as well as sites you’ve bookmarked and tagged in a drop down. For example, you could enter the tag: “investments” to find “www.fool.com”. Matched terms are highlighted, making the list of results easy to scan.

Using the new FF V3 browser for awhile now, I found myself very rarely using this—as I prefer to reserve bookmarking for site I want to remember but don’t necessarily visit with any regularity. Many of my most-visited, regular sites are on Kiwibeak anyway.

On the discussion board, it was expressed by one websurfer that he did not desire this feature. At the least in this bloggers opinion, under the ‘view’ menu (where you can disable certain toolbars from being displayed, etc), there probably should of been an additional option in regard to this new feature.

Passing along this handy trick, you can manually disable the Smart Location Bar feature:

In the address bar type this… ABOUT:CONFIG then go down to…. browser.urlbar.maxrichresults and change the value from 12 to 0.

Tags: bookmarking, disable, Firefox, Smart Location Bar, tip, websurfing.