How in the Tech

Prevent sites from appearing in Firefox Awesome Bar

By Adam Myers ⋅ November 13, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Firefox, Privacy

The location bar in Firefox 3 brought about a whole slew of functionality enhancements which quickly caused it to be dubbed the Awesome Bar. From the Awesome Bar you are able to search your bookmarks and browsing history by keyword, as well as searching Google or of course, typing and visiting a URL directly like any other browser. Searching your bookmarks and browser history is quite a powerful feature – now you are no longer required to remember the exact URL of the site you were at four days ago, if you forgot to bookmark it that is.

Unfortunately, the term awesome is purely subjective and that remains the case with Firefox’s steroided location bar. While there exists some preferences as to how and what the Awesome Bar indexes and search, there is no direct method to exclude a specific site from ever appearing. I’ll leave it to an exercise for the reader as to why one may desire this level of flexibility.

NotAwesome is a Firefox add-on that selectively takes a little shine off the Awesome Bar. Specifically, as detailed above, NotAwesome provides the ability to exclude websites from the Awesome Bar on a case by case basis. There is one major catch however – the site needs to be one you’ve bookmarked. That stipulation exists because NotAwesome leverages the ability to tag bookmarks natively in Firefox. Bookmarks tagged as notawesome are then hidden from Awesome Bar searches. As a result, NotAwesome is not ideal for completely hiding your browsing tracks – you should be using a Private browsing session that is available to Firefox 3.5+.