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Firefox address bar

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Re: Firefox address bar

#201

Post by mcpackieh »

girishso wrote: post #134
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".

The easiest way is to right-click on a search field and select "Add a Keyword for this Search"

Re: Firefox address bar

#202

Post by tzot »

pbreit wrote: post #165
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.

Chrome manages to do this without a command character. Much better UX.

Firefox without a command character searches everywhere; you use a command character to restrict your search to a specific category (history, bookmarks, open tabs etc).

Assumably Chromes does the same (ie without some prefix searches everywhere, with some prefix —or keypress— searches in a specific category). If Chrome doesn't do that, then Firefox's is the much better UX, otherwise they're equivalent.

Re: Firefox address bar

#203

Post by everybodyknows »

javajosh wrote: post #121

Great tips although I wish they'd link to the original source: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet...

There's a handy search box on the page. A query for "timeout" there leads to many calls for help, but few replies. This for instance: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1350502

Re: Firefox address bar

#204

Post by doodlesdev »

darkwater wrote: post #5
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…

Totally agree. I basically don't use bookmarks at all because the super awesome FF fuzzy search in the bar just works with my mental model (i.e. I recall some letters/words of what I want, and it usually just appears there)

Using bookmarks males it even better though, as they appear above the other suggestions. I've been adding quite a lot of websites I visit to bookmarks just because of this. It's also awesome because I can search for the name of the bookmark, so for instance on ProtonMail where I have more than one account (yes I use the webmail, I'm sorry) I can just search for "personal mail" or "work mail" and I get the URL that sends me to the inbox _in the correct account_ which is pretty awesome.

Re: Firefox address bar

#205

Post by kibwen »

archontes wrote: post #140
kibwen wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> When I start typing ebay, I want "tab to search ebay".

You can configure Firefox to do this with a single checkbox. Go to Settings, click Privacy & Security on the side, go down to the Address Bar section, and make sure that "Search engines" is selected.

When I do that, I can click in the address bar (which brings up the drop-down), type "ebay", and then you'll see "Search with eBay" appear below in the drop-down, and then a single Tab puts it into eBay search mode.

Re: Firefox address bar

#206

Post by irae »

Neff wrote: post #90
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.

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…

I used Safari for years and it is so easy to open Chrome just for Google Meet. It is way less annoying than one would imagine

Re: Firefox address bar

#207

Post by doodlesdev »

lousken wrote: 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.

You can search across tabs using the tab search in the top right corner though (an arrow pointing down). There might be a shortcut for it but I'm not aware of any.

Although if you are really opening 400 tabs at once I'd recommend either tree-style tabs or rethinking your life choices lol.

Re: Firefox address bar

#208

Post by TeMPOraL »

Parade, here comes the rain. I hate who I've become these days, only ever complaining about stuff, but here we go:

I find "^history search" to be actually and annoyingly useless because Firefox, like Chrome and seemingly every other browser, has unreliable, short-living browsing history. The times where I find myself trying to use the "^-search" in Firefox are always just a little bit after whatever I was searching for fell out of history retention window. The annoyance part is that my every failed attempt at using "^-search" is another reminder that browser vendors seem to want to get rid of browsing history entirely.

The rest of those tools, they work for me. Sometimes. "%tab-search" and "#title-search" seem to be negatively affected by what the article describes as "some sort of smart guess on what you type there", and overall I had them fail to find the exact tab/page I had open enough times, that I don't trust them.

"+tag search" - that's a new one for me, I didn't know it existed. I only recently discovered you can add tags to bookmarks, and those tags do complete for "unqualified" queries (i.e. just starting to type in the address bar) with some priority, and are displayed nicely.

Re: Firefox address bar

#210

Post by jcul »

unsungNovelty wrote: post #180
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…

There is Duckduckgo Bangs - https://duckduckgo.com/bangs . They directly searches inside a website. There are a total of 13,563 bangs of websites. Twitter, Amazon, Stackoverflow, wikipedia, arch linux. You have to set your search engine to DDG though. Wanna check if Thunderbird v115 is in arch repos? Ctrl + L, !archpkg thunderbird Boom! My favourites: !w searches inside Wikipedia !so searches for that term inside sta…

And they are also supported by kagi.

It's nice that kagi lets you define your own, so I can have custom ones across browsers / mobile / desktop... So long as I'm logged in and have configured kagi to be my default search engine (my phone defaults to ddg and sometimes I might use a browser in a VM or something).

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