User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:33.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/33.0 Build ID: 20141027150301 Steps to reproduce: * Enter a one word domains used for local development, such as "local", in the address bar * Do not specify protocol at the beginning (do not manually write 'http://' or 'https://') Actual results: * Firefox redirects to Google with the address line instead of trying to connect to the host first. Expected results: * Google should have tried to resolve the domain first - as it did in previous versions (and other browsers still do) This happens also when autocompleting from browsing history. Picking an option from the autocomplete dropdown will redirect to Google with that result instead of trying to load the address

The autocomplete issue is bug 690307. I'm hoping to still slip that fix into 34. The principle of searching first is new, but is an intentional change. If you actually click the "Yes, take me to <X>" bar that shows up at the top of the content window, it won't happen again for that host. I'm not sure which "other browsers" you are referring to - Chrome and IE both have some version of the behaviour we added. The reason we changed this is that resolving the domain is very slow for many of our users, and for most of those users, they never use local domains, so it's an unnecessary step that made one-word urlbar searches really slow compared to two-word ones. I'm going to mark this as a duplicate of the request for a pref to turn this feature off wholesale.

It's too bad this is intentional - Firefox has a dedicated search input, and is (was?) the favorite browser for developers. Now there is duplicate functionality between the search input and address bar, while removing some functionality from the address bar. I don't see an option that says "Yes, take me to <x>" in the dropdown that appears when I write in the address bar. I tried clicking on the small arrow on the right of the address bar and it had the same behavior.

(In reply to Eran Galperin from comment #2) > It's too bad this is intentional - Firefox has a dedicated search input, and > is (was?) the favorite browser for developers. Now there is duplicate > functionality between the search input and address bar, while removing some > functionality from the address bar. You could always search from the address bar, so I don't see how there is "now" duplicate functionality - this was always the case. Every other browser has only one box, so users migrating expect search in the location bar to "just work". > I don't see an option that says "Yes, take me to <x>" in the dropdown that > appears when I write in the address bar. I tried clicking on the small arrow > on the right of the address bar and it had the same behavior. Assuming "local" resolves to a local host, if you just type in "local" in the address bar and hit enter, you should get a notification bar at the top of the content that says something like "Did you mean to go to local?" with a button that says "Yes, take me to local".

(you could also manually add a boolean pref called "browser.fixup.domainwhitelist.local" and set it to true in about:config)

Yes, I know that the address bar can also search, however its main functionality is still an address bar, so removing some of that functionality while having a distinct search bar on the right seems redundant. How common is having users search for one word in the address bar? I honestly don't know, but my guess is it's not common at all. Thanks for pointing out that notification bar - I missed. That works.