Firefox 157 silently enables address bar suggestions in Europe, here's how to disable it

Firefox 157 was a big update with a fresh look, AV1 hardware decoding, and some much-needed HDR improvements. But there was another change tucked away in the stable build that most people probably missed. Mozilla quietly rolled out Firefox Suggest to sixteen more European countries, like Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, and a bunch of others.

At first, this regional update doesn’t seem like a big deal. But a quick look at Reddit shows European Firefox users were caught off guard when address bar suggestions suddenly popped up after the update.

The confusion stems from how Mozilla separates suggestion types. Disabling regular search suggestions only stops queries from reaching sites like Google or DuckDuckGo; Firefox Suggest is a separate setting.

Mozilla says Firefox Suggest provides web recommendations and sponsored links from partners such as adMarketplace and Yelp. Since these aren’t treated as standard search queries, the new toggles were enabled by default when version 157 launched in these countries.

Of course, the company needs ad revenue, and browser development can’t rely on goodwill alone. But adding sponsored address-bar links on an opt-out basis risks alienating privacy-conscious users. Expanding to new countries likely reflects new ad deals, yet even minor changes can trigger frustration and privacy concerns.

The good news is that if these suggestions are bugging you and you want to protect your privacy, you can turn them off in just a few clicks.

First, go to Firefox settings by clicking the menu button (three horizontal lines) in the upper-right corner of the browser window and selecting the “Settings” option. Then, on the left side of the settings window, you need to select the “Search” option.

Scroll down to the “Firefox Suggest” section and uncheck the boxes for suggestions from Mozilla and their sponsors. Once you do that, Firefox will stop sending your search queries out when you type in the search box.

That said, this isn’t the only issue Firefox users are dealing with. There have been reports of a nasty RAM leak when opening YouTube, and the community is scrambling for fixes. So yeah, Firefox users have had plenty to complain about lately.

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