Any way to roll back this Firefox change?

It used to be that the URL bar in Firefox had a little down arrow at the far right. Click on that, and it would give you a dropdown of 10-12 addresses you access frequently, and you could click on one of those, and it would take you there.

As of today, that’s changed. You can still get a dropdown by clicking on the address bar, but now it’s double-spaced, starts with entries for “Search Google” and “Search Amazon”, and then because of the wider spacing, only has room for 6 frequent pages.

That dropdown was my primary way of navigating to my regular sites, and so this change is driving me crazy. Is there any way to get it back to how it used to behave?

You cannot roll back an update but you can install a previous version. However, for security reasons Firefox will prompt you to create a new profile, so you’ll have to export and import all of your profile settings.

Install an older version of Firefox

Stranger

I don’t necessarily need to roll back the entire version. I was hoping that there’d be some sort of setting to change the behavior of the URL bar back to what it was before. The rest of the changes, whatever they are, can stay.

So I am not sure if just the first option is enough or you need to do the other 3 changes also.

You can at least get rid of the “search google” and so on:

Type about:config in the url bar, and say yes to any warnings that show up. in the search, type in

browser.urlbar.suggest.searches

and change that value to false.

I already had this disabled before the update. When I click on the url bar, I get ten previously visited sites.

ETA: Looks like PastTense’s solution may be better.

I’m using version 74.0.1 (64-bit) and it still shows the arrow with 10 dropdowns, none of which are Search. What version have you changed to?

75.0

They install over several days.

To download it now go to Help on the top and select About Firefox.

I find that the OneTab extension works like a charm in both Firefox and Chrome. It allows you to keep a huge list of URLs listed in, as the name suggests, one tab.

It looks like it only affects tabs you open after the change, but the solution PastTense linked seems to have worked. Thanks! Now to go close and re-open this tab.

How does this significantly differ from the “History” drop-down on the Main Menu bar?

“History” is what you’ve seen most recently, even if it’s the first time you’ve ever viewed that page. The URL dropdown is some combination of frequency and recency, so you won’t see a page in it at all unless it’s a page you visit a lot.

I did the steps PastTense listed, and I don’t have a little down arrow. I have a “toggle reader view” icon, and three little dots that opens a Page Action menu. Is there some way I can add it?

Ah! I had to restart Firefox first.

I also found this additional comment in PastTense’s link:

The last change, a few weeks ago, set a minimum window size. I searched for how to get around that and adjusted my chrome.css but it didn’t work. I like to watch my shows in a small window next to my main window and some sites won’t shrink the player when you zoom out. Doing more searches just brings me old and unhelpful tips, like “drag corner to where you want it to be!” Yeah… no. Anyone bugged by that and find a fix?

Thanks for this - it solved the problem for me.

yeah … that address-bar for their newest update*(75.0)* annoys me too … thanks for the arstechnica fix … will check it out later. occasionally, i open alternate browser*(brave)* for reference purposes. but, ultimately, all browsers change their interfaces eventually … like, when firefox changed to the hideous australis*(29.0)* … back in 2014. be nice if their interface would stay the same … and just issue the obligatory security upgrades.

Thanks, PastTense.

Related question: how to get rid of an entry in the “frequently visited” drop-down list? I have one for a site that closed last year, but which stubbornly persists.

Gah, now it’s even worse! Now I don’t get a dropdown from the URL bar at all! And the settings that fixed it before are all the same as before, so that’s not it.

I hate how when you open a new tab the urlbar expands. You could turn it off in 75 and 76 but now you can’t even turn it off via chrome.css

If you type ^ in the URL bar, you get a dropdown list. I’m thinking of making ^ my homepage…