Not sure what you mean. If I type "youtube" it starts autocompleting as "youtube.com", but the search results below the bar include youtube.com videos, a random news article with 'youtube' near the end of the URL, etc. If you want to search google or whatever from there just hit spacebar or backspace to reduce it to a bare word, and hit enter.

Tbh I prefer this over what Chrome tends to do to me. In Chrome, if I type "youtube" and hit enter it searches for youtube, despite having many such URLs in my history, including youtube.com. Firefox will just take me to youtube.com immediately.

Try doing a search for "foo.bar". When it's a run of non-spaces with a dot Firefox will never do a search and always try to interpret it as a URL. Chrome will instead search for the things it cannot resolve (at the very least don't tell me that no server could be found at something that doesn't even use a registered TLD).

Aah, yeah, it does do that. I can see that being annoying. And somewhat surprisingly, it doesn't fall back to search if you prefix with a space, so you're practically stuck adding a fake search term or some other annoying kludge...

Fwiw that has also been (generally) preferable for me: going to .local domains is a PITA on Chrome because it tries to search for it first.

You can start with ? (which works in IE and Chrome too to force a search), but then you first have to remove the www. that Firefox helpfully adds ;)

And agreed that Chrome is a little unhelpful there too; I always have to remember prefixing a non-domain hostname in our network with http://. Although by now I resorted to a bookmark.