430494 - KB article: How to disable the Smart Location Bar

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(support.mozilla.org :: Knowledge Base Articles, task)

Description

[[:Cww]]

Before Firefox3 releases, we should have a bunch of articles on how to disable new features or what to do with new warnings.

For awesomebar:
browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 0 (for getting rid of it completely)

Oldbar extension (for changing the way it looks.)

Comment 1

[myles7897]

should we put about:config in?  I am for it in this instance, cause it is relatively easy.

Comment 2

[David Tenser [:djst]]

I don't think we should add articles about unsupported about:config unless there's evidence that there is a big enough user demand for these kinds of tweaks. These prefs are not supported and we shouldn't assume people are having problems with this before it actually is a problem.

Comment 3

[[:Cww]]

This would be a SUPPORTED about:config tweak; it's not a hidden one.

Comment 4

[David Tenser [:djst]]

With unsupported, I mean we're not exposing any UI for changing this behavior, and there is no guarantee that this pref will be kept. We've had a long discussion in the newsgroup about setting a sensible scope for SUMO and this seems to be a typical article that we wouldn't be including. 

I am going to do an inventory of our articles to see where we should set the bar, so let's hold off this article until that's done.

Comment 6

[Bo]

Wrote up the article, accidentally filed a duplicate for it.

Review?

Comment 7

[Majken Connor [:Kensie]]

I think we should have a general article for people that want to revert things explaining that they should look for add-ons and give a general answer to why there isn't a preference, i.e. the devs feel this is much improved etc.

Though we should probably take this to the newsgroup.

Comment 8

[Jason Barnabe (np)]

This was a major issue today. By counting the forum search results[1] (which may contain some duplicates), there were at least 33 threads on this subject today out of 457 threads. There were also live chat sessions on the topic.

I think we need to have this article. I've prepared it to include the "unsupported" warning and to link off to another site for the actual instructions.

[1] http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-searchindex.php?words=disable_slb&where=forums&advancedfsearch=y&forumId=1&author=&daysBefore=1

Comment 9

[David Tenser [:djst]]

I've made the article public, based on the 50+ threads and many Live Chat requests about this within 12 hours. 

Drawing the line at the correct place is hard here because relatively speaking, this might not be very high user demand considering we just got another 5M Firefox 3 users. However in this case I'd rather have our helpers point to this article than providing an answer in the forum all the time.

I've verified that searching for this article works.

Comment 10

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

V.
Any further discussion should take place on the staging copy: <http://support.mozilla.com/kb/*How+to+disable+the+Smart+Location+Bar>.