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" macroexpands to
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: "maps", searches google maps
https://www.google.com/maps/search/%s/
shortcut: "img", searches google images
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=%s
shortcut: "wp", goes directly to the article if it exists
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s
shortcut: "yt", searches youtube
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s
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.
My company intranet has a shortcut/URN website that we all configure as "go", so "go home", "go paystubs", etc. Anyone can create URNs. No more stale bookmarks when the HR system keeps changing. Very useful!
Chrome broke this recently, for shortcuts that have no substitution.
The ominibox history takes over.
For example, I used to be able to just type, "yt" and go to youtube, but now Ominbox history replaces it with my most recent history item that has "yt" in it
You can also use a duckduckgo query like ! site:site.com query. That is more reliable when using something like wikipedia when you aren't sure of the exact title and don't have to type it all out.
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.
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].
Not really, Chrome-based browsers have search keywords too.
What I would like most on the Chrome-based browser I have to use at work is history (^ keywords) and bookmark searching (# tag keywords, or * bookmark keywords) using "awesomebar" operators that Firefox has.
I'd really really like it if a form of search keywords could be used for forms that don't work as GET requests.
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 machine becomes completely unresponsive.
I'd love to stay with Firefox - especially for the cross-device tab sharing and search - but the need for something stable is superseding my want to use a non-Google browser.
I use vivaldi because of the tab stack feature and until firefox gets support for something close to it I just can't switch. I tried to browse the web without it but I always come back to vivaldi. I have a tab hoarding problem and it's the only browser that actually makes helps me manage it.
Custom bookmark / search engine functionality is easy to replicate on Linux with a few shell scripts, though.
I use Brave and yet use some complex search engines such as making POST requests to APIs based on the search input and telling the browser to open a URL provided in the API's HTTP response.
Consider just how many layers of JavaShit webdevs want to slap down on their websites these days, that "minor" performance difference adds up. Death by a thousand cuts, basically.
And then there’s tree style tabs. But actually I moved to Chrome due to how many issues I ran into with tree style tabs due to firefox not letting do its thing
Now that’s awesome. Bookmarklets have felt largely useless to me since I got rid of the bookmarks bar outside of new tabs. This might make them useful again.
Or just right-click the input field, and if the browser recognizes it as a search field (they're good at it by default, but you can implement https://github.com/dewitt/opensearch to make extra sure), you'll get an option to create a search from it, with a keyword of your choosing (haven't tried Safari).
At least at some point in the past, this method had the advantage of working also with POST searches, while the manual insertion of %s works only with GET.
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 <term> searches <term> inside Wikipedia
!so <term> searches for that term inside stackoverflow
!a <term> searches inside amazon.com
!ai <term> searches inside amazon.in
!arch <term> searches inside arch wiki article for that term
!archpkg <term> directly searches for archlinux.org/packages
Also, I just learned that there is a "!hackernews"
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).
I've wrote the same, with the same algolia example :D
Do you remember if it was possible to edit or add custom search engines from GUI before? I remember having them, but I can't find it. Also it seems to me as a basic feature and not a "killer feature".
There used to be a GUI for that. Then they removed it. The functionality is still sorta, kinda available, in varying and increasingly undiscoverable ways.
Last time I checked, you had to navigate to a search engine (and/or make a search with it?) and hope its author published some magic special microformat metadata that identifies it as a search engine - then Firefox would helpfully offer you an option to add it as a search engine, somewhere in the address bar. I don't remember if it had any indicator visible by default, or if you had to right-click the address bar first.
And now I learned they "improved" this once again - hiding the feature under a right-click on a search box.
It really seems like browser vendors want to soft-kill this options. I'm just not sure why, especially when it comes to Firefox.
There's a firefox plugin [1] that lets you add custom search engines; they will be visible in the settings menu under "Search Shortcuts" where you can set the keyword to trigger the custom search.
Often times during a Teams meeting someone would wonder who had filed this ticket and I would "Control-L p Jose Smith" to instantly bring up the org chart for Jose Smith. People were amazed.
The Control-L/Command-L(mac) to focus the url bar. p is the keyword set to search the internal company org chart.
Another useful Firefox feature is to right click, Take Screenshot, and save the full web page rendered as you see it as an image. This is useful for those internal webpages with tables and fancy javascript rendered widgets that never properly render to pdf when saving the page.
With these search keywords, I've cut down on my general purpose search engine use dramatically, maybe 90%. Most of my searches through ddg/google used to be searches I intended to land on a known website with, so with search keywords for the search functionality on wikipedia, documentation websites, etc, I have been able to cut out the middleman.
Also, people slag on wikipedia's search functionality a lot, but I've found it to actually be pretty good even with imprecise searches. For instance, I forgot the name of Lubyanka, but searching for "KGB prison" found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=kgb%20prison
I use this often. I just wish there was a way to escape the keyword. Like for example if I wanted to do a web search for "hn firefox address bar" I have to click the correct search engine with my mouse. Maybe there's a method I'm not aware of.
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.
I have been using duckduckgo's bang feature for searching a particular site. e.g. !hn to search on here, !w on wiki and !g back to google is the result from ddg looks off.
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)
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<enter>" to visit the YouTube homepage or "yo<tab>" 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).
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.
It's kind of weird that these turn into bookmarks and are mixed in with your bookmarks.
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.
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 Omnibar is Google's way of nudging users to search for the term again (and thus displaying ads within the search results) instead of just picking it up from history.
Haha! Hello, fellow longtime Firefox user. I also vividly remember this term in Firefox's marketing a long time ago, but the most recent results on Google are from circa 2010. Seems they've largely dropped it as a public-facing term :)
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)
100%, I'm the same way. The Firefox address bar is truly a work of art. I used to worry that I was just crazy whenever I tried Chrome and found the experience so inferior, because how much variation could there be in fuzzy search? tons, apparently.
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.
> Even Safari is miles ahead of Chromium in this regard.
I hate Safari's address bar. One visit to a mistyped address can ruin your suggestions forever, that typoed URL will be always preferred over the correct one.
Firefox's address bar is indeed great. Always works flawlessly.
You can delete the offending URLs from Safari’s history and they won’t show up in the suggestions anymore. I only found that out while experimenting after years of frustration. In a perfect world, of course, such features would have a small UI affordance like a context menu entry for the address bar.
This was always the most baffeling thing to me -- how could google be so bad at search? But the answer, I suspect, is simple: they want you to make a new google search rather than jump straight to the site.
One reason why I prefer to use firefox at work. I can type some part of the title and it finds the Jira tickets/ confluence link easily from my history. Chrome would take me to search page and the search returns nothing since it cannot find anything from the locally hosted jira/confluence.
Also Chrome has a hard limit on the length of history that it'll store and I regularly want things that I saw more than 90 days ago. Firefox seems to be longer.
Absolutely. At the current computer I'm at, I last visited https://github.com/austinhuang0131/instagrabber in May 2020, and typing either "insta" or "austin" in the addressbar still shows that URL as a suggested address.
I remember the Opera ~9 URL bar did actually search the whole browser history (not just website url + title), which seemed pretty incredible at the time. Maybe it was a bit overkill though.
As we speak the Mozilla CEO, on reading this comment, is probably saying "see, they love our innovative addressbar; so we should focus innovation efforts entirely on that, make it entirely new, ... nothing stays the same ... we could make it vertical!" ...
It still has issues. It sucks when trying to find a previous page if there are 3 or more results for the same search term. Which happens when researching and clicking on multiple links.
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?
It 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, gives you more places to show ads (as more things qualify as search) and most importantly - legitimizes tracking every page you open - as you did a web search for the URL!
Unfortunately, Chrome owns the web, and Mozilla copies everything they do. Especially when they are FF's main source of income.
IMO, the old system was more accurate and more private. The search bar is for web searches.
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
Yep you can. I have mine configured so that it will only search when I use one of the search prefixes. So to search on google I type "g example.com", and this is unambiguous with actually wanting to go to example.com.
This is what I do for work. Most of the pages I go to are not on the open internet. And I usually want to go to a wiki page I’ve been to before or to a book mark.
If I actually want to search i use the search box. But for me the url bar is for editing and finding urls.
> Then Google realized you could combine the two; this makes it less likely you will use a competing search, gives you more places to show ads (as more things qualify as search) and most importantly - legitimizes tracking every page you open - as you did a web search for the URL!
While Google may have the poor intentions you mentioned, don't most user prefer the omnibar vs separate bars? I personally like it quite a lot.
Page titles (#) and web addresses ($) don't seem to work for me, but then they sound like they should be modifiers to the other search modifiers.
It should probably be noted that ^headphones like they suggest doesn't actually work, over here it only works with ^ headphones, since the ^ doesn't get applied until I press space and then the start of the address bar changes to "History" with a 'x' close option.
i am stunned that folks didn't know about this since i've been using this shortcut hundreds of times a day for at least 20 years. i guess the moral of the story is that browser vendors really need to make it easier to discover the useful features that are buried in documentation
Ctrl+F4, Ctrl+W close tab
Alt+F4 close window
Ctrl+(Shift+?)+Q close browser entirely
Ctrl+Shift+T undo close tab
Ctrl+Shift+N undo close window
Ctrl+N new window
Ctrl+Shift+P new private window
Ctrl+B toggle bookmarks bar
Ctrl+Shift+B open library (bookmarks window)
Ctrl+H open history in side pane
Ctrl+Shift+H open library (history window)
Ctrl+G, F3 find again
Ctrl+Shift+G, Shift+F3 find previous
Ctrl+Shift+V paste as plain text
Ctrl+Shift-Z redo
Alt+Entry in address bar opens address in new tab
Some browser-based editors will helpfully offer Vim bindings for editing, without exhaustively emulating all bindings. Of course, once in the flow of editing, I type Ctrl+W to delete a word, and voila, the tab closes!
I'd almost forgotten about Ctrl-L. I used to use it all the time on Celeron work computers with IE, because I could open the browser, type Ctrl-L and an address, and press Enter before the toolbar finished drawing. I wouldn't even see what I had typed appear before the page I requested started loading! Think I also used it with Windows Explorer, after the IE integration…
I dislike shortcuts with special characters, as its availability depends on the keyboard layout. It's quite common that the shortcut doesn't work when you have to use modifier keys to invoke it.
Some vendors make an effort to support non-US layouts, others not so much (e.g Adobe, and recently Microsoft).
As a shortcut junkie, I've even changed the OS keyboard layout to enable more shortcuts to work, and memorising the location of special characters by feel. But that's not exactly an intuitive UX.
As some examples of shortcut keys that usually brings me dread are: /, ~, [, ], ;, |
I much prefer shortcuts in the form of "ctrl + letter"
It would be nice if the author could fix this page, since the examples are incorrect and do not work as written. You need a space after the magic character.
Although I use it exactly as described (prefixing my search with the magic character followed by a space), it's not necessarily the best way to use it. If you can retrain your muscle memory, these shortcuts are better as suffixes. "% fish" will only show the open tabs (in the current container) with "fish" in them. "fish %" does the same, but when you've only typed the "fish" part, it will have the full set of search suggestions. Which are generally quite good in Firefox, and if what you're looking for is already in an open tab, it'll probably be in the list. But sometimes I don't remember if I have the tab open, so a history result would be better. With the suffix, you get the best of both worlds: the initial "fish" may show too many things, so tacking on "fish %" will restrict it to just the open tab results. That avoids doing it in two passes and having to go back and edit to remove the restriction token.
The actual feature is richer than you might think. It's only hinted at in https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet... but there's actually a little DSL for queries. You can build these things up into filters. "% fish # github" will search for open tabs with github in their title. So if you can too many results (with eg "% fish"), you can filter them down incrementally (by tacking on " # github"). Yes, this disagrees with the previous suggestion; I'm back to prefixes here.
Whoa, you're right! I know it used to be a problem, since I told several people about the feature, they tried it, it didn't work, and when looking at it I realized they were leaving off the space (or I hadn't even mentioned it).
Err... I attempted to update my comment. I guess it was too old but I still had the page open with an edit link present?
And now I notice that multiple other people are reporting that they still need the space. Something smells buggy....
> stop searching internet for local hostname I type into the bar
Yes, please.
I have a separate address bar and search bar in Firefox, and it still insists on searching DDG for local hosts names when I type them in the address bar. Stop doing this. (The solution for now is to type http://localname/ )
As long as your local names aren't changing all the time, an easy way is to create a keyword in your Firefox bookmarks, for each local host. That's specifically a keyword, not a tag. You can edit them in the Manage Bookmarks screen.
One nice feature of this is you can give a more complete URL for each keyword, for instance typing "nas" could link to "https://192.168.0.4:8181" with an IP and port number. It's instantly fast, and doesn't rely on a functioning DNS server.
The about:config dark magic you're looking for should be `browser.fixup.alternate.enabled = false`, `browser.fixup.dns_first_for_single_words = true` and `browser.fixup.domainsuffixwhitelist.<localdnsname> = true`.
Also: Show the full URI in the address bar. For some reason, firefox thinks it's cool to hide the protocol section when visiting http pages. Thankfully, it still shows https, an improvement over Chrome's mess of a UI.
Though imo the killer feature of FF address bar is simply that it's tied to a proper search history. Unlike chrome (which I sadly have to use at work), that only keep 90 days of history (!), making the address bar useless for anything but tabs, recent searches and as a link to a search engine. I really can't see an excuse for that behavior, the sqlite used by chrome is a few mb at worst.
Readit News
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=firefox%20address%20bar
Aliexpress alternativeto.net Amazon Apple AppStore ArXiv Bing Video BookFinder ISBN DHL Tracking Number DOI Resolver duckduckgo.com ebay.com Facebook HackerNews (Angolia search) ISBN Search Library Genesis MathOverflow Physics.StackExchange Scholarpedia Sci-Hub (DOI) SciRate (arXiv) Scite.ai Dictionary.com Thesaurus.com Tripadvisor.com Twitter Urban Dictionary Walmart Wayback Machine Wikipedia Wolfram Alpha Weather Underground Yelp YouTube Video Search images.google.com scholar.google.com maps.google.com news.google.com scholar.google.com video.google.com
I have about half of these memorized enough to use regularly.
For example, I used to be able to just type, "yt" and go to youtube, but now Ominbox history replaces it with my most recent history item that has "yt" in it
shortcut: "yt", goes to youtube https://www.youtube.com/
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.
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...
What I would like most on the Chrome-based browser I have to use at work is history (^ keywords) and bookmark searching (# tag keywords, or * bookmark keywords) using "awesomebar" operators that Firefox has.
I'd really really like it if a form of search keywords could be used for forms that don't work as GET requests.
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 machine becomes completely unresponsive.
I'd love to stay with Firefox - especially for the cross-device tab sharing and search - but the need for something stable is superseding my want to use a non-Google browser.
I use Brave and yet use some complex search engines such as making POST requests to APIs based on the search input and telling the browser to open a URL provided in the API's HTTP response.
Consider just how many layers of JavaShit webdevs want to slap down on their websites these days, that "minor" performance difference adds up. Death by a thousand cuts, basically.
I use the URL "https://www.google.com/search?q=site:ycombinator.com+%s" to search content from HN, and "https://www.google.com/search?q=site:reddit.com+%s" to search on Reddit. I also have "https://www.npmjs.com/package/%s" to directly go to a package page on npm.
This is probably less of a problem on firefox, where they are regular bookmarks.
Deleted Comment
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95426
Wanna check if Thunderbird v115 is in arch repos? Ctrl + L, !archpkg thunderbird
Boom!
My favourites:
!w <term> searches <term> inside Wikipedia
!so <term> searches for that term inside stackoverflow
!a <term> searches inside amazon.com
!ai <term> searches inside amazon.in
!arch <term> searches inside arch wiki article for that term
!archpkg <term> directly searches for archlinux.org/packages
Also, I just learned that there is a "!hackernews"
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).
https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html
Do you remember if it was possible to edit or add custom search engines from GUI before? I remember having them, but I can't find it. Also it seems to me as a basic feature and not a "killer feature".
Last time I checked, you had to navigate to a search engine (and/or make a search with it?) and hope its author published some magic special microformat metadata that identifies it as a search engine - then Firefox would helpfully offer you an option to add it as a search engine, somewhere in the address bar. I don't remember if it had any indicator visible by default, or if you had to right-click the address bar first.
And now I learned they "improved" this once again - hiding the feature under a right-click on a search box.
It really seems like browser vendors want to soft-kill this options. I'm just not sure why, especially when it comes to Firefox.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-custom-se...
Edit: it then gets saved as a bookmark and you can edit it like any other.
The Control-L/Command-L(mac) to focus the url bar. p is the keyword set to search the internal company org chart.
Another useful Firefox feature is to right click, Take Screenshot, and save the full web page rendered as you see it as an image. This is useful for those internal webpages with tables and fancy javascript rendered widgets that never properly render to pdf when saving the page.
Also, people slag on wikipedia's search functionality a lot, but I've found it to actually be pretty good even with imprecise searches. For instance, I forgot the name of Lubyanka, but searching for "KGB prison" found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=kgb%20prison
https://itsbehnam.com/Brave-Hacks-I-Create-my-Own-Custom-Sea...
Deleted Comment
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
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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=firefox%20address%20bar
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)
https://twitter.com/googlechrome/status/1504858912692084745
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<enter>" to visit the YouTube homepage or "yo<tab>" 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).
It is unfortunate that add-ons cannot add a set of keywords: it would be great to have all DuckDuckGo bangs defined as keywords by an add-on.
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.
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.
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
It is also great for keyword-based bookmarklets.
Haha! Hello, fellow longtime Firefox user. I also vividly remember this term in Firefox's marketing a long time ago, but the most recent results on Google are from circa 2010. Seems they've largely dropped it as a public-facing term :)
I hate Safari's address bar. One visit to a mistyped address can ruin your suggestions forever, that typoed URL will be always preferred over the correct one.
Firefox's address bar is indeed great. Always works flawlessly.
Answer: don’t show anymore than three history suggestion items and provide no way to increase it
Absolutely. At the current computer I'm at, I last visited https://github.com/austinhuang0131/instagrabber in May 2020, and typing either "insta" or "austin" in the addressbar still shows that URL as a suggested address.
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Still awesome though.
Autofill segment would be really useful, and no modern thing seem to be able to do it. But tab to search doesn't look very useful to me.
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Then Google realized you could combine the two; this makes it less likely you will use a competing search, gives you more places to show ads (as more things qualify as search) and most importantly - legitimizes tracking every page you open - as you did a web search for the URL!
Unfortunately, Chrome owns the web, and Mozilla copies everything they do. Especially when they are FF's main source of income.
IMO, the old system was more accurate and more private. The search bar is for web searches.
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
While Google may have the poor intentions you mentioned, don't most user prefer the omnibar vs separate bars? I personally like it quite a lot.
It should probably be noted that ^headphones like they suggest doesn't actually work, over here it only works with ^ headphones, since the ^ doesn't get applied until I press space and then the start of the address bar changes to "History" with a 'x' close option.
That is useful! Wonder why Ctrl-l and alt-d don't work like that?
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.
See also: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perf...https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/mouse-shortcuts-perform...https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/keyboa...
Even though the keys _are_ there I have no muscle memory for the modifiers on my right hand.
In Firefox use this for quick find on the page
Some vendors make an effort to support non-US layouts, others not so much (e.g Adobe, and recently Microsoft).
As a shortcut junkie, I've even changed the OS keyboard layout to enable more shortcuts to work, and memorising the location of special characters by feel. But that's not exactly an intuitive UX.
As some examples of shortcut keys that usually brings me dread are: /, ~, [, ], ;, |
I much prefer shortcuts in the form of "ctrl + letter"
Although I use it exactly as described (prefixing my search with the magic character followed by a space), it's not necessarily the best way to use it. If you can retrain your muscle memory, these shortcuts are better as suffixes. "% fish" will only show the open tabs (in the current container) with "fish" in them. "fish %" does the same, but when you've only typed the "fish" part, it will have the full set of search suggestions. Which are generally quite good in Firefox, and if what you're looking for is already in an open tab, it'll probably be in the list. But sometimes I don't remember if I have the tab open, so a history result would be better. With the suffix, you get the best of both worlds: the initial "fish" may show too many things, so tacking on "fish %" will restrict it to just the open tab results. That avoids doing it in two passes and having to go back and edit to remove the restriction token.
The actual feature is richer than you might think. It's only hinted at in https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet... but there's actually a little DSL for queries. You can build these things up into filters. "% fish # github" will search for open tabs with github in their title. So if you can too many results (with eg "% fish"), you can filter them down incrementally (by tacking on " # github"). Yes, this disagrees with the previous suggestion; I'm back to prefixes here.
See https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/urlbar/nonte... for gory details of the address bar's operation in general, though it doesn't go into detail about the restriction tokens.
Err... I attempted to update my comment. I guess it was too old but I still had the page open with an edit link present?
And now I notice that multiple other people are reporting that they still need the space. Something smells buggy....
I thought i was losing my mind there fore a second when these commands didn't work for me!
* correct ttps:// to https://
* stop searching internet for local hostname I type into the bar
Yes, please. I have a separate address bar and search bar in Firefox, and it still insists on searching DDG for local hosts names when I type them in the address bar. Stop doing this. (The solution for now is to type http://localname/ )
One nice feature of this is you can give a more complete URL for each keyword, for instance typing "nas" could link to "https://192.168.0.4:8181" with an IP and port number. It's instantly fast, and doesn't rely on a functioning DNS server.
Hope it works for you.
Though imo the killer feature of FF address bar is simply that it's tied to a proper search history. Unlike chrome (which I sadly have to use at work), that only keep 90 days of history (!), making the address bar useless for anything but tabs, recent searches and as a link to a search engine. I really can't see an excuse for that behavior, the sqlite used by chrome is a few mb at worst.