Opera’s Address Bar AutoCompletion
I recently upgraded the copy of Opera on one of my machines, only to find a few things about it which had changed from previous versions were driving me mad!! Immediately noticeable was that the address bar autocompletion seemed to have gone completely nuts. It was autocompleting all sorts of addresses that bore no resemblance to what I was typing, and it was giving me deep-link choices first, so I couldn’t autocomplete to just the domain I wanted, for example.
It turns out that this new behaviour is, in fact, a feature – Opera remembers the content of all the pages you’ve been to as well as just their URLs, and then it tries to give you the most relevant matches in your address bar. Well that doesn’t work for me. Address bars are for typing addresses and search engines are for searching content in my world, maybe I’ll find this useful one day but that day isn’t right now. The good news is, its easy to turn off.
Just go to Preferences -> Advanced -> History and then uncheck the box “Remember Content on Visited Pages”. Now when I start typing, I just get the URLs that look like my actual words, and with the shortest matches first. I’m safe to upgrade the other machines now!
Cor, thanks Lorna. That had started to get to me.
Still, I love that Opera accept that not all new “features” will be welcome for everyone, and tend to allow one to opt out if needs be (and sometimes even, they aren’t scared to just remove features if they prove unpopular).
Simon: Yeah I’d agree Opera’s approach to features is a good one – sometimes you have to look for settings but I change about two things (three) now from a vanilla install, so that’s not bad going
Hey Lorna,
I have to admit that I too had to get used to the weird new thingy, but I have to say that I’ve grown to like it.
It’s helped me on numerous occassions, because I didn’t have to search through my history but just type a relevant word. Also, when a URI contains the word you type, it seems to come before other URI’s of which the content contains that word.
All in all, it’s not that bad, so maybe you want to give it another try.
Berry: I guess I will come back to it another time. But if wanted to search my history, I’d search my history … and since I’m trying to type a web address, I’d like it to help me with that instead.
totally agree
this new feature was driving me nuts
googled for the answer how to get rid of it
found ur page
thanks, Lorna!
this helped some. i think it’s still doing it some. i couldn’t stand that. i found this webpage. thanks. ive only been using opera for a little bit today anyway, i used it before, but it was a long time ago. yea you have your history, what one person said, and your address bar. thanks for saying how to do this. i couldn’t figure it out.
Can this feature be completely disabled? I do not want to search from the address bar and I do not want it to keep a history.
I am trying Opera on Ubuntu since Firefox keeps freezing my system. This is going to take some getting used to. Like having a close button on each tab instead of a single close button. That and the tabs above the address bar :)
Thomas, be sure to check out the feature “Mouse gestures” as well as it’s keyboard abilities. Once you’ve got used to mouse gestures and closing tabs with ^W, you don’t want to go back.
Thomas: I think when you uncheck the box “Remember Content on Visited Pages” then it stops indexing all the content so the feature is disabled. I agree switching between firefox and opera can be a bit strange – I now like the address bar being per-tab and therefore below the tabs bar, and find that firefox looks “odd” :) I think its what you’re used to as much as anything.