My favourite find of the past 12 months is Ctrl+L which gives the address bar focus so you can begin typing.
Welcome to the club! The day I knew about it and till know I don’t think I ever clicked in search bar to search. This shortcut is very helpful! In similar context, Ctrl+w for closing tab.
Firefox address bar
161–170 of 332 posts
Re: Firefox address bar
#162I 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…
Re: Firefox address bar
#163It used to be that search and address were two different fields in the browser UI. That helped - if typed in the address bar, you were probably looking for something in an address [so if you typed potato, it could search for a url in your local history with the word potato], and not for something in a web page. Then Google realized you could combine the two; this makes it less likely you will use a competing search,…
If you turn off address bar search suggestions then the address bar will still search anything you enter that’s not a url on your chosen default search engine though. You might be able to turn off that behaviour in about:config
Re: Firefox address bar
#164Earlier 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.
Re: Firefox address bar
#165The 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
#166The 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".
However, if you edit the bookmark afterwards from the bookmarks sidebar, or add a bookmark on the "Manage bookmarks" tab (CTRL+SHIFT+O), you do see it.
Re: Firefox address bar
#167Earlier 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.
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 machi…
Re: Firefox address bar
#168The 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".
I think what people are talking about in this thread are "Search Shortcuts". And I don't know why this is a "best kept secret"; it's right in the Search section of your FF settings.
If you want to create one "one the fly", don't create a bookmark, but instead right-click in a search field and choose "Add a keyword for this search..." You can try it using the search at the bottom of this page.
Re: Firefox address bar
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see any "Keyword" field when creating bookmark, only "Tags".
If you mean from clicking on the star in the address bar, that is correct. However, if you edit the bookmark afterwards from the bookmarks sidebar, or add a bookmark on the "Manage bookmarks" tab (CTRL+SHIFT+O), you do see it.