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Firefox address bar

wiki.tilde.institute

141–150 of 332 posts

Re: Firefox address bar

#141

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 used to be baked into Chrome too but they removed it. I'm guessing to juice the Google search metrics. https://twitter.com/googlechrome/status/1504858912692084745

The Tweet says it's still there, just slightly more buried than it used to be. Which is a shame since it's one of the most useful features in Chrome and not a lot of people know about it.

Still way less confusing than Firefox's UI for this though. What I like most about Chrome's implementation is how by default the search engine is linked to the main site, so I can type "yo" to visit the YouTube homepage or "yo" to search YouTube. And there's no need to manually set anything up (except to click the "activate" button now next to each site you want to the feature on, unfortunately).

Re: Firefox address bar

#144

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…

Mobile used to have this too until they ruined it. And now they won't add it back with no valid justification.

Re: Firefox address bar

#145

Does anyone know how to delete entries from autosuggest in the address bar? Shift + delete does not seem to work on Mac..

Seems to have stopped working on Windows as well. (Or was it shift+backspace? But neither works). However, hovering over the entry I get (...) I can press to remove. Not quick if wanting to do many.

That reminds me, ctrl+shift+delete to delete history gives you a setting for "last hour", "today" etc. I wish I could have the opposite choices. Let me easily delete history, cookies etc for domains or something I haven't visited in X months.

Re: Firefox address bar

#146

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.

[deleted]

Re: Firefox address bar

#147
post #84
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This only works if you put the special character in the beginning and not at the end e.g. if I type "hacker news %" it still only filters by open tabs, but it doesn't show the "Tabs x" label (whether I add a space or not). Which is how I use it 99% of the time, since I only need to add special characters if it wasn't already finding what I meant without them.

(Not that I mind personally, since I'm already familiar with the feature)

Re: Firefox address bar

#148
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.

Switching will accelerate this.

Re: Firefox address bar

#149
post #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.

Chrome would auto install site specific search in its initial beta release in September 2008. The ability to set your own keywords came soon after. https://lifehacker.com/enable-chromes-best-features-in-firef...

Re: Firefox address bar

#150
post #86

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.

If I have 400 tabs open

I think I found your problem.

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