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Firefox address bar

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Re: Firefox address bar

#81

Post by raybb »

johnnyworker wrote: post #27
perihelions wrote: post #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" ma…

Or just right-click the input field, and if the browser recognizes it as a search field (they're good at it by default, but you can implement https://github.com/dewitt/opensearch to make extra sure), you'll get an option to create a search from it, with a keyword of your choosing (haven't tried Safari).

I implemented it for OpenLibrary (https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/pull/5104) and it was surprisingly easy and works well!

Re: Firefox address bar

#83

Post by seren »

rsapkf wrote: post #67
seren wrote: post #14

I love them, use them every day on desktop and I don't understand why it does not work on mobile

The latest Firefox mobile update added a dropdown to the address bar for switching search engines and searching through history/bookmarks/tabs easily.

Nice, I hadn't seen it, thanks !

Re: Firefox address bar

#84

Post by dao- »

seaal wrote: post #46
paol wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There should be no difference between the two ways if you enter a space after the special character.

Re: Firefox address bar

#85

Post by cubefox »

johnnyworker wrote: post #27
perihelions wrote: post #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" ma…

Or just right-click the input field, and if the browser recognizes it as a search field (they're good at it by default, but you can implement https://github.com/dewitt/opensearch to make extra sure), you'll get an option to create a search from it, with a keyword of your choosing (haven't tried Safari).

At least at some point in the past, this method had the advantage of working also with POST searches, while the manual insertion of %s works only with GET.

Re: Firefox address bar

#86

Post by lousken »

The biggest annoyance for me with firefox is that there is no modifier to search across tabs in multiple containers. If I have 400 tabs open with temporary containers extension, it renders this search feature useless.

Re: Firefox address bar

#87

Post by dao- »

freditup wrote: post #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.

The proper end user settings for this are currently in about:preferences#privacy (also linked to from about:preferences#search where most users would probably expect them). We have a myriad of about:config prefs affecting the address bar that are hard to keep track of and understand even for Firefox engineers (e.g. because the term "suggest" is overloaded), so I'd avoid recommending about:config to end users even among the Hacker News audience.

Re: Firefox address bar

#88

Post by iggldiggl »

capableweb wrote: post #48
rkangel wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Though for the full value I personally really also need some sort of interface that can show individual page visits in order to answer the question "What other pages did I visit at that point in time?" (sometimes I don't remember the right keywords to find a certain page again, but only some other page I visited during the same browsing session). The built-in history view is only of limited value here, because it always only shows the most-recent visit, so as soon as you visit a page again, it moves to the front of the list again and loses its original place and history context.

As usual, there used to be an add-on for that, which was subsequently broken by the move to webextensions (and even if somebody wanted to rewrite it, the webextension API doesn't cater for its full functionality). Thankfully some kind soul has maintained a version hacked to still work even on a current Firefox (https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/tree/master...).

Re: Firefox address bar

#90

Post by Neff »

atomlib wrote: post #49
perihelions wrote: post #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" 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.

Funny enough, I just posted on Mastodon looking for recommendations of other browsers to try.

While I love the flexibility and openness that Firefox brings, there is a resource issue for me on my macbook pro. I have to spend a lot of time in Google Meets for work, and video conferencing via Firefox seems to redline the computer... It sounds like a jet engine and I wind up thermal throttling to the point that my machine becomes completely unresponsive.

I'd love to stay with Firefox - especially for the cross-device tab sharing and search - but the need for something stable is superseding my want to use a non-Google browser.

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