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Firefox address bar

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Re: Firefox address bar

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same is available in Chrome. I made a list of shortcuts I use here [0] -- copying a few favorites below: shortcut: "aw", lets you type: "aw s3", "aw iam", etc. https://console.aws.amazon.com/%s shortcut: "amzn", searches the retail side https://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=%s shortcut: "gm", searches through gmail (change the 0 if you use multiple accounts) https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/%s shortcut…

And IIRC, Chrome copied this from Opera. It's a shame Opera never found its audience (or more specifically, a revenue stream), they pioneered a lot of browser features that we consider to be standard these days, like tabs and support for extensions.

is it really a "shame"? opera is the oldest successful browser of all time.

Re: Firefox address bar

#282
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "history retention window"? My Firefox instance has history dating back to 2016 at least...

Mine doesn't, and it's not because I deleted it or anything. My current Fx history seems to go back some unspecified time over 6 months. Actually I started looking and found the hidden history manager view, which allowed me to at least view history as a table that can be sorted. It seems that my history goes back to 2021, which is more than I thought but much less than it should. And that's by "Most Recent Visit" col…

I think linking to a Firefox account will truncate your local history to the maximum retention of Firefox Sync, which is 1 year or a size limit. It's pretty lame if that is the behaviour.

I seem to get variable retentions between computers. For instance i have FF on a work laptop with sync blocked, and have purple links and history from 6+ years ago.

FF on my personal machines which have been synced at one time or another certainly don't have 6 years of history.

Re: Firefox address bar

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mine doesn't, and it's not because I deleted it or anything. My current Fx history seems to go back some unspecified time over 6 months. Actually I started looking and found the hidden history manager view, which allowed me to at least view history as a table that can be sorted. It seems that my history goes back to 2021, which is more than I thought but much less than it should. And that's by "Most Recent Visit" col…

I think linking to a Firefox account will truncate your local history to the maximum retention of Firefox Sync, which is 1 year or a size limit. It's pretty lame if that is the behaviour. I seem to get variable retentions between computers. For instance i have FF on a work laptop with sync blocked, and have purple links and history from 6+ years ago. FF on my personal machines which have been synced at one time or an…

> I think linking to a Firefox account will truncate your local history to the maximum retention of Firefox Sync, which is 1 year or a size limit. It's pretty lame if that is the behaviour.

Uh. Yeah, that seems to track - my current history seems to back to about when I first set up Firefox Sync. If that's really the case, then... it's really lame. I don't recall it being communicated at all during Firefox account creation and activating sync, and it's exactly the kind of information I pay attention to.

In fact, the idea of enabling cloud sync being a destructive operation, silently truncating local data, is preposterous. I wouldn't have thought of it.

Re: Firefox address bar

#285
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.

I don't open 400 at once, they accumulate over time (I mostly open about 50-200 at once). And of course I am using tree style tabs, otherwise I would not be able to use more than 50 tabs efficiently (right now I have 71 opened, because I cleaned it up at the end of june). But that is not the point.

The arrow tab search does the exact same thing as using % modifier in the address bar. I still can't search pages that are in containers that are different from the currently opened site.

Re: Firefox address bar

#286
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You can search across tabs using the tab search in the top right corner though (an arrow pointing down). Which uses the same broken stuff, so you can't actually search. Check this ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1479858 Btw, the arrow icon cannot be moved from the tabs bar, annoying because I completely hide this bar, but sometimes it would be useful to have this menu.

I also have this hidden and using tree style, however I don't see a point. What is useful about this menu?

Re: Firefox address bar

#287
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.

It doesn't matter if I have 50, 100 or 400, the search just doesn't work across containers. However it is extremely annoying if I have a lot of tabs, because tree style tab also has its limits(though much higher than with the normal UI) and once those are reached it would be far more efficient to search.

Re: Firefox address bar

#288

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 was sadly deprecated on Android: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/12099

It was such a huge loss for me that for at least a year I used the outdated pre-Fenix. Now they still work on Desktop but they just stopped working on Android (althouth the bookmarks itself are synced-up)

Re: Firefox address bar

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox does have a setting to add the search bar back if that’s your jam, you can turn off address bar search suggestions in the settings too. 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

Not only that but the shortcuts haven't changed as Ctrl + L puts you in the adress bar and Ctrl+K sets you up for a search with the default engine in the adress bar

Except when you run across sites like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web that intercept Ctrl-K for their own internal search tool. At least that one passes a second Ctrl-K on to the browser for focusing the search bar. I've seen others that don't, although I can't bring one to mind right now.
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