I dislike how Chrome has turned the address bar (also known as a “location bar” or “URL bar”) into an “Omnibox”. Since I run Chrome on my Linux box, and I have a bunch of test hosts defined in my /etc/hosts file, everytime I try to shortcut by just typing a dev hostname, Google pops up a damn search result!
There are some posted methods to avoid this. One was to check chrome://flags, which does have a bunch of nice settings, however my version of Chrome DID NOT have the one to do this!
Instead I found that creating my own search engine option was the solution. Go to chrome://settings/ and choose “Manage Search Engines”. In there, add a new one with “none”, “null” and “http://%s” as the options.
Boom! No more annoying forced search! Suck it, Omnibox!
OK, deep breath.
1 reply on “Disable search in google chrome address bar”
Doesn’t work.
Google have counter acted this method by making it default to the url bar if you try this.
So now no matter what you ndo chrome will always default to the url bar as the search tool.
There is now no way to stop Google spying on the url’s we visit.