the corner office

An annoying 'feature' of Firefox cropped up today. I don't know if it's just because I've never triggered it before or because I recently upgraded to Firefox 3, but I got caught by Firefox's domain guessing feature. What it boils down to is that if you're using a simple hostname (like 'blah', common on local networks), then if Firefox can't find the host, it wraps your hostname in a 'www.' and '.com' and then goes off and tries www.blah.com.

Nice feature for some, but I really don't like it. The nice thing about Firefox/Mozilla is that when they have these contentious features, they're usually rather good about allowing you to disable them. Which you can in this case, by setting browser.fixup.alternate.enabled to 'false' in about:config.

And you can disable the keyword search feature (similar, but contacts a search engine) by setting keyword.enabled to false, as well (via).