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Firefox address bar

wiki.tilde.institute

41–50 of 332 posts

Re: Firefox address bar

#41
You can also tweak the behavior via `about:config` to emphasize the types of results you care about. I like to set `browser.search.suggest.enabled` to `false` to keep it from showing search suggestions since I almost exclusively want to either type in my own search term or go back to a previous webpage I've visited.

Re: Firefox address bar

#42
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…

Also Chrome has a hard limit on the length of history that it'll store and I regularly want things that I saw more than 90 days ago. Firefox seems to be longer.

Re: Firefox address bar

#43
post #40

Why isnt there a way to fix history. Say I have 50 sites about "headphones". I need to go through each of them to find thar particular one. So I open them one by one, but they land on top again and polute the search results.. what makes searching difficult.

There is, create a private window and your history will be fixed.

Re: Firefox address bar

#44
post #21

I use the shortcuts and address bar extensively - they made me a quick bookmarker and more often I gauge what I have indexed on a topic prior to do a websearch. With "+" you can have more than one tag to narrow down a list if it has multiple tags. While just using history+fuzzysearch works for a lot of people, I'm browsing too much to have a small list when using the history on often used terms - thus bookmarks and t…

The '+' tag search never really works for me in a satisfying way. I'd expect to be shown results that match only the tag I ask for, but frustratingly I always get bookmarks mixed in that match in the title and URLs.

Re: Firefox address bar

#45
post #25

so I tried a url that works on my local network and is in my history, bookmarks etc. Every single one of those modifiers sent that hostname with the modifier to my default search engine. Maybe it doesn't play nicely, or at all with privacy badger, ublock origin, ddg etc plugins installed?

For me, using it as it is described in the examples also does not work, instead I have to hit space after the modifier, then the address bar will go into the correct mode and the UI shows this as well.

It also works with pasting to the address bar, but the space between modifier and term seems to be required.

Re: Firefox address bar

#46
post #33

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.

That's why there's a UI affordance for it: look at the bottom of the suggestions list. These are just power user shortcuts.

I wish the tags would automatically populate when you used one of the shortcuts just as they do when you click on the UI.

Re: Firefox address bar

#47

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" ma…

This is a feature in Chrome as well!

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95426

Re: Firefox address bar

#48
post #42
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…

Also Chrome has a hard limit on the length of history that it'll store and I regularly want things that I saw more than 90 days ago. Firefox seems to be longer.

> Firefox seems to be longer.

Absolutely. At the current computer I'm at, I last visited https://github.com/austinhuang0131/instagrabber in May 2020, and typing either "insta" or "austin" in the addressbar still shows that URL as a suggested address.

Re: Firefox address bar

#49

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" ma…

This is Firefox's best kept secret.

To this day I cannot fathom anyone willingly switching from Firefox to Chrome/Edge/any other Chromium-based browser. There are so many tiny features that are useful at least to myself, while a minor JavaScript performance advantage isn't something that important in the grand scale of things.

Re: Firefox address bar

#50
post #35
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right-click on a search box > "Add a Keyword for this Search". Edit: it then gets saved as a bookmark and you can edit it like any other.

I don't have that. Where? Algolia and google search boxes(? the input fields?) don't show anything like that. edit: also if I modify a keyword for my opensearch/xml search engines in about:preferences#search , it won't show up as a regular bookmark. Also I can't even see the URL for those search engines.

Right click inside a search box. There should be the option "Add a Keyword for this search".
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