[Firefox Tip] Remove “This Time Search With” One-Click Search Buttons from Address bar

In Mozilla Firefox web browser, when you start typing something in address bar (or URL bar) or search box, Firefox starts showing URL suggestions taken from your favorites and browsing history. Firefox also shows a small toolbar containing few search engine buttons at the bottom of the URL suggestions drop-down list in address bar. You get a message “This time, search with:” along with a few search engine buttons such as Google, Bing, Amazon, DuckDuckGo, Twitter and Wikipedia.

Following screenshot shows the search engine buttons toolbar shown at the bottom of address bar overlay in Firefox:

These buttons are called One-Click search engines or One-Off search buttons. As soon as you click on a search engine button, Firefox searches for the typed text using the selected search engine.

Many Firefox users don’t like these extra search buttons and they find it annoying to see them every time they type something in the address bar.

In old versions of Firefox, it was possible to remove these extra One-Click search buttons using a hidden preference/flag present in about:config page. Users needed to set browser.urlbar.oneOffSearches preference to False in about:config page to disable all extra search buttons from the address bar.

In newer versions of Firefox, the preference/flag has been removed and no longer works. Now people are asking how to get rid of these One-Click search buttons from Firefox address bar?

Fortunately, Firefox still allows to remove or customize these One-Click search buttons using its Options page. You can remove all or selected search engine buttons from Firefox address bar by changing Firefox preferences.

If you also want to disable or remove these extra One-Click search engine buttons from Firefox address bar bottom, following steps will help you:

1. Open Firefox and start typing something in address bar. Once Firefox shows search engine buttons at the bottom of the address bar, click on the Options (cog-wheel) button showing next to search engine button icons.

Alternatively, click on the Hamburger (3-lines) icon present at the right-side end of the toolbar to open the main Firefox menu. Now click on Options menu to open Firefox settings page.

You can also direct option this page using about:preferences command in address bar.

2. Now click on “Search” tab and in right-side pane, scroll down to bottom and go to “One-Click Search Engines” section.

Here you can choose which search engine buttons should display below the address bar. You can remove all or selected search engine buttons.

To remove a search engine button, you just need to click on the tick mark or check mark (✓) present near the search engine name. As soon as you click on the tick mark, it’ll remove the search engine from address bar.

To remove all search buttons and the whole “This time, search with” toolbar, uncheck all search engine names given on Options page.

That’s it. Now type anything in address bar and you’ll no longer see One-Click search engine buttons at the bottom of the address bar.

Also Check:

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