Customize address bar suggestions in Waterfox

As you type in the address bar, Waterfox offers suggestions to help you get where you are going. This article explains where those suggestions come from and how to control them.

Tip

Waterfox’s suggestions are based on your own data and your chosen search engine only. There are no sponsored suggestions or partner content, and nothing is sent to Mozilla. The sponsored and partner elements of Firefox Suggest are disabled and locked at the time of building the software.

Where suggestions come from

Browsing history — page titles and addresses from your history, read from local data on your own computer.
Bookmarks — page titles, addresses and tags from your bookmarks.
Open tabs — pages you already have open, so you can switch instead of opening a duplicate.
Shortcuts — sites you have saved.
Search engines — search terms offered by your default search engine, if you have search suggestions turned on.
Quick actions — things you can do straight from the address bar, such as clearing history or opening Settings, without going to the menus.

Everything except search engine suggestions is computed on your machine from data you already have.

What Waterfox does not include

Firefox Suggest also displays sponsored and partner-supplied results. Waterfox does not display any of these:

Sponsored suggestions from adMarketplace, Yelp or AccuWeather.
Wikipedia, stock, flight and sports results retrieved from Mozilla.
Real-time suggestions fetched from Mozilla as you type, including the Oblivious HTTP variant.
Trending searches and weather suggestions.

The corresponding preferences are locked off, so they cannot be re-enabled from Settings or turned on remotely.

Manage your suggestion settings

Click the menu button, then select Settings.
Select Search.
Scroll to the address bar section and check or clear the sources you want.

Changes are saved automatically.

Search suggestions and your privacy

Search engine suggestions are the only data that leaves your machine. When enabled, the characters you type are sent to Waterfox’s suggestion service in real time for every built-in engine. We run this service ourselves to ensure that your keystrokes do not reach the search engine until you have decided to perform a search.

To stop anything leaving your machine until you press Enter, open Settings, select Search, and clear Provide search suggestions. See the Privacy Policy for the detail.

Manage individual suggestions

Select the ⋯ button next to a suggestion in the address bar results.

Remove from history — drops that entry from your history so it stops being suggested.
Remove from autofill history — for an autofilled address, stops it being offered for the same query again.

Adapted for Waterfox from the original Firefox article Customize Firefox Suggest settings. Original content by Mozilla Contributors. Licensed under the CC BY-SA 3.0.