At some point in my Internet travels, Firefox 3 stopped acting the way browsers have worked for 15 years. Normally if I punch cnn into the Address Bar, I get (surprise) cnn.com. These days, I’m getting a Google search for the keyword cnn instead, which is enormously unhelpful. It’s not obvious, but Firefox is performing a Google search in both cases. The difference is giving me the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ result versus the whole damn results page. After some research, I realise that I’m living in Bizarro World: no one but me has this problem, but everyone wants to have it intentionally as a feature.
In a bit of convoluted problem solving, I reverse engineered a solution to a problem I didn’t have to get a solution to a problem I did. By outlining the new steps here, hopefully I’ll save someone out there some trouble.
- Type about:config into Firefox’s Address Bar. The application will try to coax you away; don’t let it. Continue on.
- Find the parameter named keyword.URL in the list.
- There’s no telling what the parameter’s value will be in specific cases, but chances are it’s set up to send you to a results page instead of ‘I’m Feeling Lucky.’ To fix that, double-click on the value of keyword.URL and paste in http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q= . It’s ugly, but it works.
- Surf just like it’s Netscape 4.