Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox address bar

wiki.tilde.institute

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 332 posts

Re: Firefox address bar

#261

Post by freditup »

dao- wrote: post #87
freditup wrote: post #41

You can also tweak the behavior via `about:config` to emphasize the types of results you care about. I like to set `browser.search.suggest.enabled` to `false` to keep it from showing search suggestions since I almost exclusively want to either type in my own search term or go back to a previous webpage I've visited.

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…

Thanks for the improved tip - I have found it hard to parse through all the address-bar-related about:config options in the past, the UI seems like a better way!

Re: Firefox address bar

#262

Post by watashiato »

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.

The no-addon workaround for this is to right click any tab, first select all tabs and then bookmark all tabs. Give the folder a name and open it in the bookmark manager. Now you can select them all and copy the URLs.

It's an awkward solution, but it does work and is relatively quick.

Re: Firefox address bar

#263

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

This is a very old feature that (IIRC) all browsers copied that dates back to at least Microsoft Internet Explorer. I also recall people marketed it as a gimmick and came up with some silly names for it, e.g., "shortcuts". (I will try to find the originating browser and date it was introduced unless someone here beats me to it.)

Even today, Chrome presumptuously calls this macro expansion "site search".

I use it to access static pages. For example, I have local httpd's serving local pages on localhost addresses. One is a "clipboard" that I use in Chromebook "Guest" mode to output text from Chrome to a file descriptor, e.g., stdout or a file under /usr/local. This enables me to use UNIX utilities to process text from Chrome. (Chromebooks attempt to limit Chrome user access to the filesystem to a folder that the user can only access by using Chrome.)

For example, given the macro "https://127.0.0.8/%s.html", when I type "clip" in the address bar, the browser navigates to a local page

   https://127.0.0.8/clip.html
This page is an HTML form with a textarea where I can paste text that I want to output to a file descriptor, e.g., stdout or a file under /usr/local.

Another example is a static page that is a list of web search results from various search engines. These results pages are generated by a command line web search system I created using only standard UNIX utilities.

A final example is that I use "site search" to quickly navigate to chrome://settings pages with a single key, e.g., chrome://settings/clearBrowserData, chrome://settings/siteData, chrome://settings/content/all, or chrome://settings/searchEngines.

1. I find this label comical as I'm not a "developer". I'm just a computer user trying to work around problems caused by ad-supported "tech" companies in the comparitively rare instances I have to use one of their hopelessly complex graphical web browsers.

Re: Firefox address bar

#264

Post by wlesieutre »

MetallicCloud wrote: post #254
nine_k wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another great thing that only seem to exist for Firefox is Tree Style Tab [1] and a bunch of plugins around it. It completely changes the way I browse. There is an honest but much, much more limited attempt top bring a something similar to Chromium: [2]. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... [2]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tree-style-tab/oic...

Is there a good way to hide the top tabs without getting into barely supported config files? I like TST, but I gave up on it because I could never get the top tabs hidden correctly, and all the information I could find on the internet was different levels of out of date.

I see a sibling comment posted a link to some tab bar hiding CSS, but having gone though the same "different levels of out of date" problem myself I'll add my own solution that I'm currently using in Firefox 114 on Windows 11. Not perfectly space efficient, but avoids some issues with totally hiding the window titlebar, since I still wanted to keep the minimize/maximize/close controls up there.

Some of this may be platform specific to Windows (can't speak to window management buttons on other platforms), but hopefully it helps if anyone in this thread needs it or lands here later from search results:

  /*  Hide the tabs within TabsToolbar*/
  .toolbar-items {
      display: none;
  }
  
  /* Make the min/max/close buttons align to the right*/
  #TabsToolbar {
      display: flex;
      flex-direction: row-reverse;
  }
  
  /*  Hide the titlebar spacers, which push the buttons away from the corner */
  .titlebar-spacer {
      display: none;
  }
  
  /* Hide the sidebar header */
  #sidebar-header {
      display: none;
  }
Stupid that this sort of fiddling is required when other browsers (like Edge and Brave) are doing native sidebar tabs, but I do like how compact Firefox's can be, plus being a tree instead of a flat list.

Enabling userChrome.css files and finding where to put it is left as an exercise to the reader.

Re: Firefox address bar

#265

Post by plingbang »

rvba wrote: post #40

Why isnt there a way to fix history. Say I have 50 sites about "headphones". I need to go through each of them to find thar particular one. So I open them one by one, but they land on top again and polute the search results.. what makes searching difficult.

Interestingly, Firefox records all your visits to a particular page, not just the latest visit. You could've changed the history sort order to "first visit" so that the list doesn't change when you revisit the page but that option simply isn't there in the UI.

Re: Firefox address bar

#266

Post by nine_k »

wlesieutre wrote: post #264
MetallicCloud wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a good way to hide the top tabs without getting into barely supported config files? I like TST, but I gave up on it because I could never get the top tabs hidden correctly, and all the information I could find on the internet was different levels of out of date.

I see a sibling comment posted a link to some tab bar hiding CSS, but having gone though the same "different levels of out of date" problem myself I'll add my own solution that I'm currently using in Firefox 114 on Windows 11. Not perfectly space efficient, but avoids some issues with totally hiding the window titlebar, since I still wanted to keep the minimize/maximize/close controls up there. Some of this may be pl…

Indeed. Works for me, but I'd love it to be an about:config setting for power users, or maybe even a View menu item.

Re: Firefox address bar

#267

Post by nine_k »

wlesieutre wrote: post #264
MetallicCloud wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a good way to hide the top tabs without getting into barely supported config files? I like TST, but I gave up on it because I could never get the top tabs hidden correctly, and all the information I could find on the internet was different levels of out of date.

I see a sibling comment posted a link to some tab bar hiding CSS, but having gone though the same "different levels of out of date" problem myself I'll add my own solution that I'm currently using in Firefox 114 on Windows 11. Not perfectly space efficient, but avoids some issues with totally hiding the window titlebar, since I still wanted to keep the minimize/maximize/close controls up there. Some of this may be pl…

Finding the profile directory is as easy as opening about:support (also available via the Help menu).

Re: Firefox address bar

#268

Post by wlesieutre »

nine_k wrote: post #267
wlesieutre wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a sibling comment posted a link to some tab bar hiding CSS, but having gone though the same "different levels of out of date" problem myself I'll add my own solution that I'm currently using in Firefox 114 on Windows 11. Not perfectly space efficient, but avoids some issues with totally hiding the window titlebar, since I still wanted to keep the minimize/maximize/close controls up there. Some of this may be pl…

Finding the profile directory is as easy as opening about:support (also available via the Help menu).

IIRC there's also a config flag you need to set, otherwise it won't load the userchrome file. I forget the details, it's been a while since I set this up.

Re: Firefox address bar

#269

Post by Liquid_Fire »

sixothree wrote: post #138
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.

You could use the GUI buttons that appear at the bottom of the suggestions - they even show the respective special character in the tooltip.

Re: Firefox address bar

#270

Post by raytube »

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…

[dead]
Post reply on HN