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!