How to disable Search Suggestions in Firefox Search Bar

Search suggestions help you to find out common phrases that other people have searched for. This feature is offered by the search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.) and not by Firefox. Firefox merely retrieves the search suggestions from the search engines, and displays the list. By default Firefox comes enabled with Search Suggestions. In the below screenshot, you can see that Firefox shows ‘suggestions‘ besides the first item in the drop down list.

You can turn off this feature if you want to by either of the following two methods.

1. Disabling Search Suggestions from the Search Bar

• Right-click on the Search Bar.
• The menu shows ‘Show Suggestions’.
• Click on the menu item to toggle the state of search suggestions (changing it from enabled to disabled and vice versa).

2. Disable Search Suggestions through the Search Engines Manager.

• Click on the drop down arrow beside the search engine icon of the Search bar.
• Click ‘Manage Search Engines…. ‘

• Untick the ‘Show search suggestions’ check boxto disable search suggestions in the Search Bar.

Note: This feature is applied to all the search engines present in the list and NOT to any individual search engine. For example, though Google is the selected engine in the above image, unchecking ‘show search suggestions’ turns off suggestions for all the other search engines as well.

Search suggestions are different from search history auto-complete list

Even after disabling Search Suggestions, a drop down list might still show up while typing in the Search box. This is due to the auto-complete feature of Firefox which shows this list, retrieved from search history. The search suggestions list is marked with the word Suggestions as show in the screenshot below.