User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.1 Build ID: 20110928134238 Steps to reproduce: Resubmitted the current URL by selecting the address bar and pressing the "Enter" key. The URL was: http://localhost/Other/Scripts/Word%20Finder.php Actual results: Firefox fell back to performing a Google Search instead of loading the URL. Expected results: Firefox should have loaded the URL in the location bar. The problem is caused by two separate Firefox behaviors. The first behavior is that Firefox replaces encoded characters (e.g. %20) with the actual characters they represent (e.g [space]). This has already been filed as a bug report by others for various other reasons. The second behavior is that firefox assumes anything with a space character to be an invalid URL, and thus it assumes it must be a search phrase. Combine the above behaviors and you get the problem I'm referring to. When I visited the page "http://localhost/Other/Scripts/Word%20Finder.php", Firefox replaced the encoded space character (%20) with an actual space, making the URL in the location bar appear as "localhost/Other/Scripts/Word Finder.php". Notice how the http:// prefix has been stripped, and the encoded space character (%20) has been replaced with an actual space character. Upon re-submitting the URL, Firefox now assumes the URL "localhost/Other/Scripts/Word Finder.php" is a search term. Firefox is basically shooting itself in the foot with the end user being the one that suffers. This is one of the main reasons why I really disliking URL re-writing by web browsers; it introduces a lot of bugs and hinders usability by putting invalid characters in URL representations, like the space character, which causes problems with copy/paste and other built-in functions that depend on a valid URL. There are a few ways this problem could be fixed, but I'd personally like to see Firefox's URL manipulation dropped, so URL's like "http://localhost/Other/Scripts/Word%20Finder.php" remain unchanged, without any string replacements or prefix removal.

Disable the keyword search feature http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Location%20bar%20search or use a complete domain with TLD "localhost./test a"

Thanks for the workaround, but I hope your not proposing that as an acceptable solution? There's a fundamental problem here regarding ambiguities in the keyword search feature and the manipulation of the URL in the location bar which really need to be resolved. Do you not agree?