How to Remove Embarrassing Sites from the Firefox Awesome Bar

In August of last year, Mozilla research showed that one of the reasons why people don’t want to upgrade to Firefox 3 is the Awesome Bar. When you’re typing in your address bar, the Awesome Bar displays suggestions based on your browsing history and bookmarks. This is a great time saver… except if you visit sites you that you’d rather not see show up there. Rest assured: we’ve got a solution.

The trick we’re going to use to delete sites from the Awesome Bar doesn’t involve any additional extensions. In fact, you can try it right now if you’re reading this in Firefox. Here’s how you do it:

1. Go to the address bar and type something that brings up the embarrassing website.
2. Use the arrow keys to select the item.
3. Press the Delete key.

This will only let you hide individual URLs from the Awesome Bar. Would you rather disable the Awesome Bar entirely? You guessed it… there’s a setting for that.

1. Open Firefox’s settings window. How you do it, depends on your OS. On Windows machines, you’ll find it in Tools > Options.
2. Go to the Privacy tab.
3. Search for ‘Location Bar’, open the drop-down menu and choose ‘Nothing’.

Note that you can also prevent sites from appearing in the Awesome Bar by using Firefox’s Private Browsing mode. Whenever you use this feature, all your traces will be cleaned up nicely after leaving Private Browsing mode.

So there you go, you can now listen to Hannah Montana music on YouTube all you want. Just make sure no one is looking over your shoulder and no one will ever have to know.