Maybe someone can tell me how to do this w/o deleting all my history (which I think would do it).

All I want is to be able to type a few letters in the Firefox search box and have the sites I want come up. Currently, for instance, I type di in the box and get 2 commercial sites and an old thread from DIY. The one I want is the 4th on the list. Sometimes I mis-key and it goes to one of the commercial sites that I haven't visited in years.

This is an old slow machine with little memory, so the last thing I want is to go to a new site with animation and tons of info to download.

Using XP (told you it was old) and FF 48.0.2 and Google as the search engine.

 

Open the FF menu (three vertical lines in the right corner)
Select [options]
Select [privacy]

You'll see "location bar"
Uncheck "history".

Nothing is deleted but auto fill won't use history.
If "bookmarks" is checked.... autofill will use your bookmarks.

See if you like this.
You can always go back and recheck history.

 

If your talking about the search box in the sort of upper right corner even with the address bar, just highlight the entries (using your mouse pointer or arrow keys) you don't want and press the delete key. This also work for the address bar if you use it for searching. Also works if you use google search page for finding stuff.

 

Awesome... thanks for the info Tumble.

 

The change in FF would basically be the same as deleting my history except it would still be there for later.

I can't get any item to highlight. It's either select it with a left click or nothing. At least in bulk. One at a time works, but they return if I go to different terms and then try the original again. For instance I'll type "di" and a commercial site is first on the list. Delete the commercial site then use the terms "ki" as a search and a different commercial site is 1st. Delete that and go back to "di" and there's the commercial site at the top again.

Maybe we are talking 2 different animals. Could you screenshot me what you mean?

 

The way Tumble mentioned.... you go to the little blue triangle at the end of the address bar. When you place your curser there it says "show history". Then the history list is visible. You can go down the list with your cursor and it's highlighted. Click on delete and it's gone. But this method is deleting history. Not all of it just selected items.

That works great for me.

For you.... maybe you want to put the addresses you use into your favorites and then the auto complete only uses your favorites instead of history.

 

"I can't get any item to highlight. It's either select it with a left click or nothing. At least in bulk. "

Not sure what you mean by this, the bulk comment. When I say highlight I mean the entire search suggestion background becomes blue (Just like PJ said). Deleting can only be done 1 suggestion at a time.

One of the ways FF populates this is by webpages you have visited, the more times you visited the more likely it will populate. Now if you have visited a number a pages at a certain site all of which start with "do" then all those pages have to be deleted. So if "doityourself" is in your favorites and you have visited a bunch of different pages/posts (#19361!) FF thinks these are important to you and will try and populate the results with these.

Until you delete enough of the page from your history of that site to the point that FF thinks you don't care about it anymore, similar pages will reappear.

What I wind up doing for FF (since it will eventually start to screw up the suggestions because it is combining search results from FF/google/favorites) is delete my browsing history every so often. It doesn't take long until those sites that I visit frequently start to repopulate and all is good.

You can do the same for google (delete your search suggestions/history) but I have found google for the most part to be very good on it's suggestions. FF just seems to get cluttered/confused after awhile.

Awhile being 4-6 months.

 

Suppose you click History, show all history & put the "di" in the search history box on the right?

 

donoli...then it comes up with the most recent page. It just came up with this page when I tried it.

As to the other advice...the commercial sites are still at the top of the lists. Select them, delete them, close the tab or do another search, then go back to the original I was trying to delete and they are back at the top of the list. I'm thinking it has something to do with cookies?

Like I said, just an annoyance more than anything.