How-To Geek
Change Ctrl+Enter Behavior in Firefox
My good friend Daniel asked me yesterday how to change Firefox so that Shift+Enter auto-completes *.org instead of *.net. After about a 2 minute google session, I had the answer to share with everybody.
If you are unfamiliar with how this works, you can enter in howtogeek into the address bar, and use Ctrl+Enter instead of just hitting enter and Firefox will automatically complete it to www.howtogeek.com.
About:Config Tweak
To adjust the built-in Ctrl+Enter setting, you can just set some values in the Firefox configuration to change the default from .com to whatever else you want. If you want to change Shift+Ctrl+Enter then you’ll have to skip down to the next section.
Navigate to about:config in your address bar, and then filter by browser.fixup as shown here:
There are a couple of values that you can set related to this setting:
- browser.fixup.alternate.enabled – You can use this to turn the Ctrl+Enter behavior off entirely.
- browser.fixup.alternate.prefix – This value sets the prefix assigned before the keyword you type.
- browser.fixup.alternate.suffix – This value sets what is assigned after the keyword. For instance, you could use this to change the default suffix to your country code, like .co.uk
Use the URL Suffix Extension
If you want to configure all of the settings, including the Shift+Enter for .net and the Ctrl+Shift+Enter for .org, you can use the URL Suffix extension to configure all of them, or even set a custom value for when you hit Enter in the address bar.
Install the extension, and then open up the options through the add-ons screen. You’ll see this easy to use dialog:
Any changes you make in here should be immediate.
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Comments (12)
Programmer by day, geek by night, The Geek, also known as Lowell Heddings, spends all his free time bringing you fresh geekery on a daily basis. You can follow him on Google+ if you'd like.
- Published 09/28/07
Didn’t know about that feature … looks cool, thanks :)
Wow just what I was looking for, it helps you add in .com.au and remove the rarely used .org
Perfect!
Thanks for the tips and pointer to URL Suffix. I’ve been looking for a way to disable the Shift-Enter behaviour because of the annoying way it interacts with Smart Keywords (e.g. if I type google “search terms” in the address bar and hit Enter a few milliseconds before releasing the Shift I was holding down to add the last quote mark, it appends www. and .net and messes it up).
how can we change the behaviour of ctrl+shift+enter and shift+enter without this addonn?
It is said to skip down to the next section for ctrl+shift+enter?
Is there a version for Firefox 3?
The current version of “URL Suffix Extension” (0.3.3) is not compatible with Firefox 3.x :-(
Any other solution to customize the Shift-Enter shortcut ?
This was a comment on the firefox add-ons page for this extension. (I tried it and it works perfectly.)
“3.0.1 working version
Love this addon. For those wanting an updated version that works with 3.0.1, here ya go: http://rapidshare.com/files/133157937/urlsuffix_0.3.7.xpi
by Lee Glover on July 28, 2008″
Fantastic!!! Thank you so much. I had the brazilian version which gave .com.br very annoying to me!
Greets
When I leave the prefix blank, it continues to insert www — thoughts? I want it to go to an internal domain .web.domain.com that doesn’t require the www, but when I leave it blank, it enters it and of course, fails.
This question should maybe be a separate thread, but it closely parallels this topic, so I will leave it here. IE8 has a “shift+enter” shortcut that navigates to the first entry in the smart address bar. Any way to make Firefox do that with “shift+enter” as well?
Thanks for such a gr8 article…
thanks