Live data from Hacker News

Firefox address bar

wiki.tilde.institute

1–10 of 332 posts

Re: Firefox address bar

#2
I don't think I've ever used these modifiers but Firefox's address bar, Awesomebar, is indeed awesome. Compared to the utter garbage that is Chromium's Omnibar, I can find any page I've visited within a few key strokes. Chromium, on the other hand, almost immediately forgets and you have to go to the actual History to find it. Even Safari is miles ahead of Chromium in this regard. I'm still convinced that crippling Omnibar is Google's way of nudging users to search for the term again (and thus displaying ads within the search results) instead of just picking it up from history.

Re: Firefox address bar

#3
post #2

I don't think I've ever used these modifiers but Firefox's address bar, Awesomebar, is indeed awesome. Compared to the utter garbage that is Chromium's Omnibar, I can find any page I've visited within a few key strokes. Chromium, on the other hand, almost immediately forgets and you have to go to the actual History to find it. Even Safari is miles ahead of Chromium in this regard. I'm still convinced that crippling O…

> Awesomebar

Haha! Hello, fellow longtime Firefox user. I also vividly remember this term in Firefox's marketing a long time ago, but the most recent results on Google are from circa 2010. Seems they've largely dropped it as a public-facing term :)

Re: Firefox address bar

#4
post #2

I don't think I've ever used these modifiers but Firefox's address bar, Awesomebar, is indeed awesome. Compared to the utter garbage that is Chromium's Omnibar, I can find any page I've visited within a few key strokes. Chromium, on the other hand, almost immediately forgets and you have to go to the actual History to find it. Even Safari is miles ahead of Chromium in this regard. I'm still convinced that crippling O…

Same here. I have a lot of bookmarks, and the bar finds it.

Re: Firefox address bar

#5
post #2

I don't think I've ever used these modifiers but Firefox's address bar, Awesomebar, is indeed awesome. Compared to the utter garbage that is Chromium's Omnibar, I can find any page I've visited within a few key strokes. Chromium, on the other hand, almost immediately forgets and you have to go to the actual History to find it. Even Safari is miles ahead of Chromium in this regard. I'm still convinced that crippling O…

Totally agree. I basically don't use bookmarks at all because the super awesome FF fuzzy search in the bar just works with my mental model (i.e. I recall some letters/words of what I want, and it usually just appears there)

Re: Firefox address bar

#6
The killer feature is that you can extend this with your own macros. E.g. if you want the address bar to recognize "hn " as a prefix keyword, and redirect "hn firefox address bar" to, say, Algolia — you simply create a bookmark with "Keyword": "hn" and "URL": "https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%s" (not actually a URL, don't click on it) – %s indicating where the macro parameter substitutes. Then "hn firefox address bar" macroexpands to

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=firefox%20address%20bar

Re: Firefox address bar

#7
I used to use the asterisk a lot in college when I kept a larger collection of bookmarks for class related resources. These days I really don't use book marks as much. I feel like the majority of my repeated browsing experience ends up on HN, GitHub, and our logging service.

Re: Firefox address bar

#9
This isn't average user friendly. No one except nerds will remember these symbols. Why not simply make it so that typing !history ____ will search history, !bookmarks ___ will search bookmarks and so on? This at least stands a chance of being used more widely.

Re: Firefox address bar

#10
"?" is a very useful if your search is being treated as a URL instead of a search query, i.e. if you need to search for something which ends in ".io"
Post reply on HN