Fixed: Firefox Automatically Adds www. and .com
Submitted by User ProfileRob on 5:57pm, Wednesday, 2007-08-01

This has bugged me for a long time but it just took a little searching to fix. I enter the URL http://copper/ and Firefox can't connect so it decides that I really meant http://www.copper.com/. This is never what I meant. I don't know who runs copper.com, but they can rest assured that they'll stop getting requests from me for the internal web services that I run at home. The same thing happens even if you use the name localhost. I fully expect that most visitors at http://www.localhost.com/ are Firefox users who are trying to access a web server on their own computer.

Apparently it was turned in to a preferences setting years ago as a result of this bug. The feature is called "domain name guessing" or a URL fixup and according to the site that tipped me off to this it might be a feature of Thunderbird as well.

In current versions (Firefox 2) it can be found and turned off by entering about:config in the address bar. This brings up a huge list of settings. Find the setting browser.fixup.alternate.enabled (typing the name in the Filter box at the top makes it easy to find). Double click the name of the setting or its value to set it to True or False. You want False to stop this behaviour.

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At 7:10pm, Monday, 2007-10-29, Torgny said:

Thanks for the tip! That feature has been annoying me for some time now!

At 3:58pm, Wednesday, 2008-04-02, Dale said:

Same here, thanks! It seemed like such an IE-like feature too, and bugged the crap out of me.

At 8:24pm, Tuesday, 2008-05-06, Rolf said:

Thanks, it saved me a lot of frustration at work today. You've been linked at:
http://rolfje.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/no-more-wwwlocalhostcom/

Oh and your CAPTCHA is really,really unreadable and very hard to get right. And at reloading for a "new code", my message dissapears. I am using Akismet at my blog, which catches spam and does not require users to type CAPTCHAs. It also enables my blog for the blind.

At 10:46am, Friday, 2008-05-09, Rob said:

Glad you found the tip handy Rolf. Sorry about your experience with the captcha. It's on my hit list for improvements but I've never been comfortable with the idea of Akismet.

At 7:43am, Sunday, 2009-01-18, Anonymous said:

OH WOW THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH! I have a HUGE home network, and I couldn't figure out why Firefox was not connecting to my names.

At 10:53pm, Wednesday, 2009-02-18, Anonymous said:

Thanks! Took a lot of searching to find this!

At 10:04am, Tuesday, 2009-06-23, Anonymous said:

Dear Rob,
This post was very interesting. I am new to web development and when I tried to find localhost, my firefox browser was behaving exactly as you described.
Now that I've followed your instructions, instead of going to www.localhost.com, it simply says Page Load Error. Is this an improvement? How can I access the web server on my own computer ?(I have installed XAMPP and Joomla and would like to get started already!)
TIA!

At 7:19am, Friday, 2009-07-31, Anonymous said:
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Thanks Rob!

At 4:33pm, Tuesday, 2011-08-02, Anonymous said:

Thanks for the tip. http://127.0.0.1 will also bring up localhost

At 8:19am, Saturday, 2011-09-10, Anonymous said:

Thanks a lot dude...

At 8:52pm, Monday, 2011-10-10, Anonymous said:

This is great. Thanks.

At 9:42am, Wednesday, 2012-10-10, Anonymous said:

5 Years down the line and this article just solved a major annoyance of mine, it's still relevant as I'm using FF 10 ESR.
Thank you rob for taking the time to write the problem/solution down in a way that made it easy to find and easy to fix.
Regards.
Colin

At 5:32pm, Tuesday, 2012-11-13, Anonymous said:

Thanks Rob, I found these instructions independently but they don't work for me. No change in the browser behavior even with "false" set for browser.fixup.laternative.enabled.

Al