The Firefox AwesomeBar is the replacement for the address bar that the Mozilla Foundation put in Firefox 3. Using it, you can quickly access your browsing history, favorites, and tagged favorites by simply typing. For example, you can access visited pages or favorited pages by typing part of the page's name, which is handy if you don't remember its URL.

However, since it's a radical change from the traditional purpose of the address bar (accessing URLs typed in the past and nothing else), some people aren't very comfortable with it and long for a way to disable the AwesomeBar.

One way, documented in both the MozillaZine KB and at Location Bar Autocomplete by D. McRitchie at MVPS, is to add a about:config configuration item called Browser.urlbar.richResults and set it to false. [My experience with this option says it doesn't work. -ArielMT]

The more effective way of disabling the AwesomeBar is through the Firefox plugin oldbar.