And of course, we've learned from the reception to the awesome bar that this feature will be able to be COMPLETELY turned off with a single pref and checkbox in the options dialog, haven't we?
If you would like the results to be ordered alphabetically, set browser.formfill.bucketSize to a large value such as 999999999 in about:config. You could also just increase the number slightly if you still like the ordering by frecency but prefer that entries with a similar frecency score are grouped together and sorted alphabetically within the bucket.
I fought like the dickens to get the Awful Awesome Bar tamed, now the Autofill has been infected.
It would be nice if it could be turned off or if there was some kind of guide for how to set about:config parameters to get what I want. But, no, no such thing.
I'm not upgrading from 3.5 Firefox. This irritation just isn't worth it. Sorry Matthew.
It took me weeks to find the workaround that required me, just a normal user not an expert, to delve into about:config, which I had never even heard of, to get dates to sort in date order. But forms are used in many ways and no one solution will satisfy everybody.
Your assumption that people do not need alphabetical sort is bogus. Because it also includes loss of the numerical sort -- and I will not go through an entire form list looking for a part number "at random" or based on the frequency that the part number was entered in the past. This has reduced my productivity considerably and I assume it will do so for my employees as well. I will recommend that we revert to 3.5.x on Monday unless there is a legacy feature in the config that can be turned on. I am reverting now. Hope someone is mentoring interns there.
Firefox was meant to be a simple, user friendly browser. Things like this random sorting of autocomplete entries make it actively user-hostile. The browser.formfill.bucketSize set to a high value works, but WHY should this be necessary?
Say you have a form used for data entry, with a text input box into which you've previously entered lots of different text, including "Designer", "Set designer", "Lighting designer", "Associate director", "Front of house leader", "Assistant designer". When your data entry person wants to enter "Designer", they previously could just start typing "D", perhaps "De", and it'd be there. Now, they get all the different things that happen to have "de" in it no matter where they are, in an order that changes depending on what they've been doing recently [1], and it is more work to locate and select Designer, not less, although they knew exactly what they wanted. This behaviour is great in the URL bar, but is very much unwanted in form history auto-complete.
[1] The comment above to alter browser.formfill.bucketSize can fix the changing ordering of results at least, but doesn't fix that it's not prefix-only any more. Is there any config variable we can alter to change that? Or otherwise it looks like another 3.5 rollback here, I'm afraid. If there was simply a config variable to select which behaviour was preferred, that would be great.
After finding and reading the documentation at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Namoroka/Improved_form_history and playing around with the config variables more, it seems that if you don't change bucketSize (so set that back to 1), but instead change *prefixWeight* to a very high number instead, then (understandably) the prefix ones appear first with the others underneath (in who knows what order). If there are multiple entries with the same prefix, I'm not sure what order they'll be in, but this is at least a more workable solution, and hopefully might be helpful to others out there in the same position.
And of course, we've learned
And of course, we've learned from the reception to the awesome bar that this feature will be able to be COMPLETELY turned off with a single pref and checkbox in the options dialog, haven't we?
Yay! It's great this got in
Yay! It's great this got in for 3.6!
Making my life easier, one
Making my life easier, one form at a time! Nice work.
Wow, I've been hoping for
Wow, I've been hoping for this for some time! Great work!!
Great! And how do I disable
Great!
And how do I disable this 'intelligent sorting and get back the alphabetical sorting I had before?! Please!
Member for
15 years 9 monthsHow to sort results alphabetically
If you would like the results to be ordered alphabetically, set browser.formfill.bucketSize to a large value such as 999999999 in about:config. You could also just increase the number slightly if you still like the ordering by frecency but prefer that entries with a similar frecency score are grouped together and sorted alphabetically within the bucket.
And how do we turn this off?
And how do we turn this off?
Is there any way to disable
Is there any way to disable this new feature :(
I liked the previous alphabetical sorting.
End to this madness
I fought like the dickens to get the Awful Awesome Bar tamed, now the Autofill has been infected.
It would be nice if it could be turned off or if there was some kind of guide for how to set about:config parameters to get what I want. But, no, no such thing.
I'm not upgrading from 3.5 Firefox. This irritation just isn't worth it. Sorry Matthew.
It's not a bug, but a "feature"
It took me weeks to find the workaround that required me, just a normal user not an expert, to delve into about:config, which I had never even heard of, to get dates to sort in date order. But forms are used in many ways and no one solution will satisfy everybody.
Give us an option to go back to numerical (alphabetical) sort
Your assumption that people do not need alphabetical sort is bogus. Because it also includes loss of the numerical sort -- and I will not go through an entire form list looking for a part number "at random" or based on the frequency that the part number was entered in the past. This has reduced my productivity considerably and I assume it will do so for my employees as well. I will recommend that we revert to 3.5.x on Monday unless there is a legacy feature in the config that can be turned on. I am reverting now. Hope someone is mentoring interns there.
Why is this forced on people?
Firefox was meant to be a simple, user friendly browser. Things like this random sorting of autocomplete entries make it actively user-hostile. The browser.formfill.bucketSize set to a high value works, but WHY should this be necessary?
This change hurts data entry :(
Say you have a form used for data entry, with a text input box into which you've previously entered lots of different text, including "Designer", "Set designer", "Lighting designer", "Associate director", "Front of house leader", "Assistant designer". When your data entry person wants to enter "Designer", they previously could just start typing "D", perhaps "De", and it'd be there. Now, they get all the different things that happen to have "de" in it no matter where they are, in an order that changes depending on what they've been doing recently [1], and it is more work to locate and select Designer, not less, although they knew exactly what they wanted. This behaviour is great in the URL bar, but is very much unwanted in form history auto-complete.
[1] The comment above to alter browser.formfill.bucketSize can fix the changing ordering of results at least, but doesn't fix that it's not prefix-only any more. Is there any config variable we can alter to change that? Or otherwise it looks like another 3.5 rollback here, I'm afraid. If there was simply a config variable to select which behaviour was preferred, that would be great.
Found a slight config fix :)
After finding and reading the documentation at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Namoroka/Improved_form_history and playing around with the config variables more, it seems that if you don't change bucketSize (so set that back to 1), but instead change *prefixWeight* to a very high number instead, then (understandably) the prefix ones appear first with the others underneath (in who knows what order). If there are multiple entries with the same prefix, I'm not sure what order they'll be in, but this is at least a more workable solution, and hopefully might be helpful to others out there in the same position.