Regular users of Firefox must have noticed that when they type in a few words in their location bar (instead of a URL), Firefox automatically performs a Google search. If Google is sure about what you’re looking for, it’ll redirect you to the top hit web page - which it is generally very good at deducing. This is called “Browse by name” and is a feature of Google introduced for its toolbar, but since it uses URL query strings, IE and Firefox have both managed to hook into it for our convenience.⌘

I don’t use IE, but Firefox has a little niggle of sorts when this is used. It saves two URLs for every “browse by name” search - the Google search URL and the URL you are redirected to. Take the term “MultiClutch” for example. The actual redirect ends up at this page which Firefox also saves:⌘

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If one doesn’t take care to delete these at regular intervals, a simple entry of “search” or “url” will show all the URLs that you’ve accumulated over the weeks and months. Privacy concerns aside, this slows Firefox down loads because the “awesomebar” does a search through your URL history with every keystroke. The more URLs it has to search through, the more CPU cycles it’ll use.⌘

I’m not sure if an extension can stop this behaviour, but Firefox itself should do this. Delete the redirecting URL (it’s a 302 redirect - thanks @singpolyma), and only keep the end point. The same should go for any redirecting URL anyway. Nobody needs to know where you were redirected from. Not saving it should be common sense.⌘