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Firefox address bar

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Re: Firefox address bar

#131

Post by kristiandupont »

frankjr wrote: 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…

This was always the most baffeling thing to me -- how could google be so bad at search? But the answer, I suspect, is simple: they want you to make a new google search rather than jump straight to the site.

Re: Firefox address bar

#134

Post by girishso »

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…

I don't see any "Keyword" field when creating bookmark, only "Tags".

Re: Firefox address bar

#135

Post by marcosdumay »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #103
atomlib wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Firefox is increasingly unfriendly to power users. Wouldn't surprise me if they got rid of this feature someday because they have statistics showing few people use it.

Firefox is trending into the unfriendliness of Chrome and the other mainstream browsers.

That irritating and horrible; but until they follow that trend to conclusion, it's not a reason to switch at all.

Re: Firefox address bar

#136

Post by [deleted] »

masfuerte wrote: post #129
dao- wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 amo…

The UI doesn't let you turn off searching from the address bar. It does let you choose to have a separate search box, but that doesn't seem to alter the address bar's behaviour. And when you do disable search with about:config the prompt still reads "Search with Bing or enter address".

[deleted]

Re: Firefox address bar

#137

Post by thesuitonym »

Aardwolf wrote: post #53

That's really cool! But perhaps this should be made discoverable by e.g. showing the tokens or just a list of different search options somehow (right clicking the address bar, or a small button on it you can press, ...) BTW something I really dislike about firefox is the switch to tab behavior when your bookmark/url happens to match an open tab: I guess it tries to be economical and bring you to a tab where you alrea…

There are buttons at the bottom of the address bar for Bookmarks, Tabs, and History, and they even show you the shortcuts.

Re: Firefox address bar

#138

Post by sixothree »

Santosh83 wrote: post #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.

That was my first thought. I will literally never use any of these simply because I can't remember all of them. !h __, !b __, or !a __ would be something I could possibly remember.

EDIT: To be clear I hate being a downer here. But I will never use these. Nobody I work with will ever use them either. This is for the 1% of the 1% and a few minor tweaks would make it actually useful with the default bindings.

Re: Firefox address bar

#139

Post by Jap2-0 »

tjoff wrote: post #80

One thing I'm missing is able to copy the URL of many tabs. As soon as you were able to select multiple tabs for making bookmarks I just assumed that you could ctrl+c and get the urls in plaintext. But doesn't seem to be that easy.

I use a nice little Firefox extension (might also be available for Chrome) called TabList - it's about 20 lines of code and works great.

Re: Firefox address bar

#140

Post by archontes »

kibwen wrote: post #127
archontes wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I want is tab to search. Actual, identical-to-omnibar tab to search.

If you have the focus in the address bar and press Tab, Firefox puts you into search mode (while retaining focus in the address bar) using your default search engine. Is there something missing?

I'm using Firefox right now. When I highlight in the bar and press tab, ONLY when the drop-down bar is showing, it moves the cursor down one to Amazon, which is not my default search engine, but the first one alphabetically.

So that doesn't work.

I also don't want to search my default search engine. I want tab to search for the panoply of websites that the omnibox will search. When I start typing ebay, I want "tab to search ebay".

I know I can set them up manually (a pain, but might be worth the investment to avoid the google overlord), however, I still don't get the "tab to search blah" function with a keyword. I have to type the keyword exactly -instead of having tab function as autocomplete- then space for my query.

What I want is omnibox tab to search.

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