XML News from Friday, May 27, 2005

Here's a problem that's been bugging me for a few months. In Firefox I like to be able to type in a phrase or a keyword in the URL bar (not the search bar) and have it do a Google search. That works about 80% of the time, except when the search term includes a period. In that case, no matter what, Firefox interprets the search as a host name and responds with a 404. For instance, I can search for "Java 5" but not "Java 1.5". I could swear I had this working in Mozilla, but I've never been able to get Firefox to act like this. Does anyone know the last magic config option to make Firefox allow searches on the URL bar when the search terms contain periods? I'll offer a free copy of XML in a Nutshell (or another one of my books of your choosing) to the first reader who responds with a solution that fixes this problem.