Automatically Clear Firefox Search Bar After Each Search [Firefox Privacy]

Firefox has a habit of leaving your last search query in the search bar openly visible to all onlookers and snoopers, which many considers as an intrusion into their privacy.

In today’s Firefox Gyan, we show you how you can automatically clear out a query from the Firefox’s search bar on pressing enter.

Searchbar Autosizer was intended as an extension that could resize your search bar dynamically as you type so that the search bar can be reduced to a very small size when not being used. However the feature that we are interested in this post is its ability to clear the search bar on submitting a search query.

Steps to follow:

• Install Searchbar Autosizer from Mozilla addons site.
• Restart Firefox.
• Select Tools –> Addons. Select Searchbar Autosizer and hit Options.
• Select Advanced button. Ensure that the “Empty searchbar when a query is submitted” is checked.
• Click OK.

If you find that the search bar is too small after installing this addon, you can change the default size from the Advanced screen. From now on, any search query entered into the search bar will be cleared when you hit enter.

Bonus tip: If going through all the above screens and dialogs seems to much pain, use the about:config way. To enable auto clearing of search bar set browser.search.cleanOnSubmit to true. To disable this, set its value to false.

Searchbar Autosizer