Firefox question: autocomplete fields prefilled?

Factual Questions
1

Our computer crashed. After 3 visits by a technician, we’ve wound up with a new hard drive (among other things) which means we have to reinstall everything.

One piece of software I use regularly is SolSuite. A highly addictive solitaire game. Like crack, one might say.

Into our brand-spanking-shiny-new install of Firefox, I typed “solsuite” into the google search window (the thing that shows up to the right of the URL field).

And was presented with a number of choices to complete my search value, including “solsuite crack”, “solsuite serial”, “solsuite activation”, solsuite 2005…

Anyone else found anything like this with a new software install? Bizarro.

2

Yeah, it’s doing the same auto-complete you’d get if you were on the Google homepage and did the search. It starts suggesting possibilities as you type. I really don’t know if there’s a way to turn it of, frankly I find it pretty helpful.

3

Yep, me too. I find it useful on occasion and unintrusive otherwise

4

IIRC, this is a new feature of Firefox 2.0 (I think it was also available as a plugin for earlier versions). I find it quite helpful too – particularly when I don’t quite remember how to spell a word, or the next word in the phrase I’m Googling decides to fly away from my mind.

It looks to me like your query was more along the lines of “what’s this all about then?” than “ARGH! SATAN! HOW DO I TURN THIS OFF?!”, so you might be willing to leave it on for a while to see if you get used to it. But if you ever do want to turn it off, click the Google icon beside the field, select Manage Search Engines, and untick Show Search Suggestions.

5

I’ll use my special husbandly knowledge to clarify Mama Zappa’s question.

We’ve used Firefox for a while, so we know about its auto-fill-in feature. We find Firefox’s auto-fill-in suggestions are very handy, but I can see where some people might find the feature annoying. (The way I find MS Word’s attempts at “help” to be annoying, condescending, and rather the opposite of helpful.[sup]1[/sup]) Thanks, Mbossa for the hint on turning the feature off. Ignorance fought!

But the question my dearest MZ had wasn’t “What is Firefox doing”, and wasn’t “How do I stop this crazy thing?”, but was “Why does a fresh install of Firefox have these particular (and peculiar) items in its auto-fill-in list, right out of the (virtual) box???” It seemed seriously odd that starting to type “solsuite” in the google search box would bring up auto-fill-in choices that, to our knowledge, have never been typed by our fingers.

The hard disk is new, and barely had the OS on it. The Firefox install is new. Heck, we’ve barely used IE on the thing. But it had several fill-in choices for an odd phrase. How did it know?

Firefox must have a metric ship-load[sup]2[/sup] of search phases pre-loaded in its auto-fill-in list. I just typed “rut” in the google search box, and I got “rutgers” “ruth cris” “ruth england” and “ruth warwick” among others. “virg” got me “virgin” “virgin blue” “virgin atlantic” “virginia” among others. Even “abc” got me a bunch of choices.

Nothing like a little experiment to solve the problem! Too bad Mama Zappa and the Zap-lets/Little Typos[sup]3[/sup] are away tonight. They won’t find out the answer until tomorrow night!

-Typo Knig (aka Papa Zappa)

[sup]1[/sup]


Death to Clippy!!!

There, I feel better. I can save the rest of my MS opinions for The Pit, where they belong.

[sup]2[/sup] Just being family friendly/work safe. :wink:

[sup]3[/sup] Band name! Twice, I think.

6

Ahh, gotcha. Sorry about the misinterpretation, Mama. That’s actually a very good question, with an interesting answer (well it’s interesting to me anyway). It’s based on a new(ish) technology called Google Suggest (actually, I’ve just found a couple of blog posts about it dated 2004, so in internet terms it’s not new at all).

The secret here is that those search phrases aren’t being stored on your computer at all – they’re actually on Google’s servers. As you type into the box, your computer is secretly sending each partial phrase to Google. Google uses those partial phrases along with its history of every search ever performed on its servers, applies eleven secret herbs and spices, and fires back a list of suggestions.

You might have noticed, unless you have a particularly fast internet connection, that the delay between typing a new letter and getting the suggestions is noticeably longer than when you do it in a traditional text box. That’s because of that round trip to Google. When you look at it that way, and consider how many millions of other people are probably typing into their search boxes at the same time, it’s actually pretty bloody fast.

After playing around with my search box for a bit, I’ve just noticed that it actually uses both Google Suggest and the run-of-the-mill local browser history. Once you’ve built up a bit of history with your search box, the suggestion list will split into two, with your local history at the top and Google’s suggestions at the bottom. Turning off Show Search Suggestions as per my previous post only actually disables Google Suggest. If you ever want to stop the box from popping up altogether, go to Tools|Options|Privacy and untick “Remember what I enter bla bla bla”.

Google also has Suggest running on a test version of their website at Google. Their FAQ, at Manage Google autocomplete predictions - Computer - Google Search Help, seems to be a bit out of date, but it’s still worth reading. Finally, typing “Google Suggest” into your favourite search engine (whichever search engine that might be ;)) will bring up plenty of nice bedtime reading material.

7

Thanks for the info, Mbossa, that makes a lot of sense. I guess our connection is fast enough that I didn’t notice the delay. The dead-on suggestions were creeping me out a bit :slight_smile: