Undo whatever changes in the address bar autocomplete system

[DK7777]

It is recommending wildly inaccurate autocompletes, pushing sites I have barely ever used or haven't been to in months ahead of sites that start with the same letter that I go to daily. I shouldn't have to manually add a keyworded bookmark or delete a rarely visited site from my history entirely to make the autocomplete go back to the site I visit multiple times a day.

[FanaticalApathy]

Likewise. Typing 'to' used to autocomplete to a site I visit on a daily basis. It did so reliably enough that my muscle memory automatically types 'to<Enter>' to get to the site. As of maybe a week ago it started suggesting tomshardware.com, a site I rarely visit. I don't see any method of removing the suggestion. The site I want is still in the suggestion list, it's just been demoted. Is Mozilla getting paid to push certain sites?

Firefox Dev Edition 148.0b2. 

[MrTAB]

This is hitting me as well.

I type test and press return to test my connection.
This is autocompleted to https://test.aerialcornwall.com/ - a broken website I have never ever heard of or visited.
This only happens with Google as my search engine so firefox may be negotiating autocomplete results with the search engine. Funnily I moved from Chrome due to this issue (search honey get honeybooboo).

I have search suggestions on, but trending search suggestions off.
To test this, I just disabled search suggestions, and found it was still happening.

I now see another section called "Firefox suggest" underneath this, with:
"Suggestions from Firefox and our partners in your address bar."

Having this as an independent section rather than a nested section or directly under search suggestions is odd. There are a lot of settings under here e.g. "suggestions from sponsors".
The only way I could stop my test->https://test.aerialcornwall.com/ BS was to disable suggestions from Browsing history. Well, it was only in there because firefox suggested it to me! So I can't actually tell which of the 12 Suggestion pathways caused it to arrive and force its way into my daily life.

I also find if I delete the auto-completed search suggestion and go to  another tab or window, when I select the address bar again the autocomplete restores. To me this is unexpected behaviour - I have not entered a new bit of text and the address bar I was editing has now re-entered the part I just deleted a second ago while I went and checked something. Really annoying.

[FanaticalApathy]

I also found that disabling suggestions from browsing history stopped the site from appearing. Of course, the site I wanted also didn't show up (don't usually use bookmarks)

I've at least temporarily resolved the issue by going into Manage History, searching for tomshardware.com, right clicking and choosing Forget this site... Now the site I actually visit regularly is the top result again.

As a test, I tried following a link to tomshardware.com from a Reddit post. Thankfully, this did not immediately put tomshardware.com back at the top of my suggestions list. In my case, willing to say resolved, but I'll follow up if it reoccurs.

[Standard8]

The fix is being worked on and tested at the moment. It is planned to be released in Firefox 148 which is due out on 24 February.

[wayfaringrob]

Are we really just letting this linger until the 24th? What a joke. Extremely frustrating.

[wayfaringrob]

I just updated to 148 and am noticing zero improvement. What's going on here? This is unacceptable.

[james33]

Hi wayfaringbob,

The changes in 148 should make autofill feel better. However, some sites may still appear due to their accumulated weight from 147.

To clean those up: go to History > Show All History, search for any unwanted domains, then right-click and choose Forget About This Site (or delete specific URLs).

I hope that helps. Please let us know if you're still seeing issues after that.

[wayfaringrob]

The site that I want (news.google.com) and should be autocompleted by typing 'N' (and was autocompleted before 147) has 565 visits. The site I keep getting by typing 'N' (noai.duckduckgo.com) has 31. Even after removing this base url from the history, it is still autocompleted. If you are suggesting that I must delete all history on that domain (e.g. noai.duckduckgo.com/*), that is ridiculous. I don't want to lose my history nor should I have to do that for basic functionality that works in every other browser including Firefox 146 and prior.

[wayfaringrob]

It's been another month and a half...is there a fix for this in the works aside from rolling back my version permanently? I'd rather not have to do that, but this is frustrating enough where I am considering alternative options.

[wayfaringrob]

This is still not working properly in 150. You said to let you know if I'm still seeing issues; I did, but now I'm not hearing anything from you. Where is the fix for this?

[james33]

Hi wayfaringrob, sorry I missed your message from earlier.

Would you be open to discussing on Bugzilla? I can start a ticket to dig deeper on what's going on.

[wayfaringrob]

I'm not sure what that is but let me know what you need from me.

[james33]

Sure, I posted some instructions in this comment on Bugzilla.

If you could follow the steps and take a screenshot of what you see that could be helpful to us. I provided code that only examines noai.duckduckgo.com and news.google.com

[wayfaringrob]

Came to report the same. I disabled automatic updates after the announcement that Firefox would become an "AI browser," and only recently accepted the 147 update to find this broken. Insanely frustrating.