I explicitly stopped this habit so that I don't accidentally do it with sensitive data I don't want to go to my search engine provider's auto complete API.

Disabling remote search autocomplete is one of the first things I do when I setup a new browser instance. It's a privacy and security nightmare I don't want.

Same here. And I just noticed yesterday that Firefox had added and enabled a "Suggestions from sponsors" feature. Which I've now disabled, but presumably it's been sending anything I type into the address bar to Mozilla since 2021. I am tired of Mozilla but Chrome is very much worse.

ETA: I only noticed yesterday because a "sponsored suggestion" popped up when I was typing, which I've not seen before. So either they actually enabled it recently, or advertisers don't bid on the kinds of things I usually type.

ctrl-k is for the search box

ctrl-l is for the address box

At most I want the address box to do is look up a dns name. Which can still be a risk if I were to hit "enter" with sensitive information which could in some cases get pushed out to my DNS provider (which is me, but then it's possible the address would be pushed out to another resolver, and will also be logged in an unexpected place)

> Disabling remote search autocomplete

I've always have a suspicion that even with auto complete off, some sort of telemetry or obscure feature is still leaking browser address bar text.

I do a similar thing but use the start menu search, Ctrl-C, WIN, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-X. You can do it all in one hand and can get really fast, assuming the start menu doesn't lag behind. There's also the downside that it publishes all of your clipboard content to Bing search so maintain vigilance for confidential data...

Have you tired using the run action instead to clean the data? Win+r

This reminds me of the 'spacebar heating' xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1172/

I've been using Win+R to paste it in the windows run box.

Amazingly still works on Win 11 and still seems to keep it local (bypassing the windows search), so I'm pleased to report consistent results for 30 ish years.

Of course, now I've mentioned it out loud, it'll be the next thing to go...

I don't know if it's just me being old and grumpy, but everything windows 8 and later (server 2003) seems like half-baked, unfinished enshittification. Trying to do something even vaguely "advanced" to a network adapter puts me back in windows 95 land along with the run box. The "manage" pane with device & disk manager and logs is from a totally bygone era yet it seems to still be the only way of getting that information. The worst bit is, I'm not complaining. All the bits that look and feel like they've been forgotten since Windows 2000 are the easiest, least infuriating bits of the system I interact with.

I use Edge’s address bar to de-wrap long URLs that have line wrapping and indentation in a proprietary packaging system’s SBOM. I paste in, then copy out the unwrapped URL to another application.