The “Awesome Bar” in Firefox 3 is awesome to some and awful to many.

“Awesome Bar” lets you quickly return to Web pages, without bookmarking them, even if you don’t remember the address. As you type in the address bar, it searches for that text in the addresses and titles of pages that you’ve visited previously. It also can search on tags — keywords that you can associate with a web page.

Personally, I don’t like the “Awesome Bar” much and have it turned off on my Firefox browser. If you want to do the same, follow The Geek’s footsteps.

Step-1:

Launch Firefox 3 browser.

Step-2:

Go ahead and type-in “about:config” on the address bar (the Awesome Bar). Firefox displays a warning that this action might void your warranty. Warranty? What kind of a warranty?

Step-3:

Anyways, just go ahead and click on the “I’ll be careful, I promise” button.

Step-4:

Firefox will display its configuration information.

Step-5:

Go head and type-in “browser.urlbar.maxrichresults” on the “Filter” box. Firefox will narrow down to the corresponding configuration entry.

Step-6:

Right click on “browser.urlbar.maxsearchresults” and click on the “Modify” menu option.

Step-7:

On the “Enter integer value” dialog box there will some positive number (mostly 12). Change that value to a negative value like –1.

Step-8:

Click the OK button and restart the browser.

Now when you type-in anything into the address bar (Hey!!! We made the Awesome Bar into an Address Bar!!!) no historical information gets displayed. And that means no more embarrassments!

That’s pretty simple, isn’t it?

If you’d rather prefer to watch a video of The Geek disabling the “Awesome Bar”, play the video below.

If you don’t want to delve thru these steps but would rather trust a Firefox Add-on to take care of this, there is an OldBar Add-on that you can install that will change the Awesome Bar to behave like it does in Firefox 2.

You can install the OldBar add-on from the Firefox Add-ons page.