Firefox not using history in Awesome Bar search

I've been using Mozilla Firefox as my development browser of choice for some time now, and recently the latest upgrade to v43.0 was applied. However, after the upgrade completed, I noticed that, when I typed in the first few letters of a website into the awesome bar, e.g. www.goo.. it wasn't retrieving relevant results from my browsing history.

A quick google search later revealed this was not an uncommon experience, even if it hadn't happened to me before. Some suggested solutions included

• installing the Places Maintenance add on
• verifying that the places.sqlite file is not read only
• deleting the places.sqlite file and starting fresh

But none of these worked for me.
On a whim I opened the configuration menu using the about:config advanced settings page and searched for "history", when I noticed that the "places.history.enabled" value was manually set to false. I don't remember making this change since the upgrade completed, and I had not experienced the issue in the previous version of Firefox, so I restored the default value - true - and restarted.

Fortunately, this change had resolved my problem, and I was able to continue my browsing experience as before!

Movember 2015

So, one month, and €105 raised in donations, later Movember is over for another year. This was my fifth time giving my time (and my upper lip!) up for the men's health foundation, and I very nearly didn't do it.
For some reason, there wasn't the same build up of excitement that was in previous years. Certainly there were less members of staff in the office where I work doing it, I'm actually pretty sure I was the only one doing it, whereas before there was upwards of 30 men all growing out their moustaches for charity.
With about a week to go in November, I got a large online donation from a friend. Larger than any other donation I had received until then, including a cash donation I had turned down for being too generous. I messaged them, and said it was too large.
What I didn't know was that their father had been diagnosed with cancer, but after surgery and recovery, was doing much better, and part of the donation was from him. So I'm glad I did Movember this year, and I'll be glad when I do it next year.
Take care of yourself.