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 :)
(-: Although…I've had the most success with guiding new users by calling it "the thing that looks like an air vent" or "a funny little group of three horizontal lines".
When I called it "the hamburger menu", I got confused stares. Maybe if the top line looked more like the top of a hamburger bun… although why a hamburger should mean "menu" is still a bit odd.
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.
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.
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 search ebay".
I know I can set them up manually (a pain, but might be worth the investment to avoid the google overlord), however, I still don't get the "tab to search blah" function with a keyword. I have to type the keyword exactly -instead of having tab function as autocomplete- then space for my query.
> 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.
I think that's just because the ebay search engine is installed by default? They want this to work for any site with a search engine they've ever visited - at least, that's how it works in Chrome, IIRC.
I also remember missing that feature dearly when I switched from Chrome to Firefox. However, some time in the intervening decade, they've actually added that to Firefox! I can type "<Ctrl-L>ebay<TAB>esp32<ENTER>" and I end up on the eBay search page for "esp32". Perhaps there is a setting or about:config option that needs to be toggled? Many of Firefox's best features are thusly hidden.
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.
Though for the full value I personally really also need some sort of interface that can show individual page visits in order to answer the question "What other pages did I visit at that point in time?" (sometimes I don't remember the right keywords to find a certain page again, but only some other page I visited during the same browsing session). The built-in history view is only of limited value here, because it always only shows the most-recent visit, so as soon as you visit a page again, it moves to the front of the list again and loses its original place and history context.
As usual, there used to be an add-on for that, which was subsequently broken by the move to webextensions (and even if somebody wanted to rewrite it, the webextension API doesn't cater for its full functionality). Thankfully some kind soul has maintained a version hacked to still work even on a current Firefox (https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/tree/master...).
> 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.
That woud be nice. Or respond to the Delete key. I tried pressing that, Option-Delete, Shift-Delete, and by then I'd spent more time than it would have taken to move the highlight onto the row I wanted. (>.<)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I notice that ? is mentioned in the submitted article, but I didn't get what you said from it. Regardless, ? is apparently what I needed to solve my problem. Thanks!
Happened after a windows update for me. I've tried to restore them, inspect the database where they should be, but they were already gone. Maybe if you have a system backup, you can find yours!
I've found this random tutorial how to mass create Edge search engines by editing the Edge database https://jeffhandley.com/2022-10-17/custom-search-engines
if you want to store your search engines in a separate file in the future
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".
I don't have that. Where? Algolia and google search boxes(? the input fields?) don't show anything like that.
edit: also if I modify a keyword for my opensearch/xml search engines in about:preferences#search , it won't show up as a regular bookmark. Also I can't even see the URL for those search engines.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(function () { let sel = window.getSelection(); let Qr; if (sel && sel.toString().length > 0) {Qr=sel.toString()} else {Qr=prompt('Search Site for','');} let hna=window.location.hostname; if(Qr) { location.href='http://www.google.com/search?&q=site:'+encodeURIComponent(hna)+'+'+escape(Qr) }})();
You can attach to a keyboard shortcut with a launcher or applescript.
Non power users would use this more if the docs, marketing and promotion of it was prominent and talked about (or made to look "sexy" for lack of a better word). I think what we're seeing is that the "UX" folk have hijacked the conversation and made it so that it is the only expression of the capabilities an app has for user interaction.
I'm sitting here, recalling all my chats and meetings and workshops with UX folk, and not once can I recall the topic of keyboard shortcuts or tab sequence being brought up. It was all about color, branding, spacing, user flow, "journeys", "experience", conversion funnels, and all things visual.
You can do it in Raycast along with a lot of other shortcuts outside of web browsers. I actually like it better through Raycast because it acts as a universal search, app launcher, calculator, 1Password interface, etc. that's always available and not dependent on a browser.
yep, just hit up 'manage search engines' and add a shortcut. I use this to navigate to servicenow documents when someone IMs me their number, one of my most used workflow helpers.
https://<your servicenow base url>/text_search_exact_match.do?sysparm_search=%s
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 have no doubt that Google is hamstringing performance on Firefox. But that is far outside of my sphere of control so I am focusing on the things I can effect.
Another member recommended disabling hardware acceleration so that is the first thing I'll try. If you have any other recommendations on how I can reduce the impact of the issue I'd love to hear them.
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.
Everyone is there for a different minority used feature. By caring only about the feature used by the majority, you are actually satisfying no one.
That’s why product managers use persona on top of metrics. Nice products have niche features and some kind of personality. You don’t want to overfocus on them but stripping them all is a losing move.
WordPerfect and Quattro Pro (now WordPerfect Suite, I think) seem to persist due catering to special needs of law firms. Catering to some niche users can keep you afloat despite an otherwise market-dominant competitor.
"WTF" is there to maintain in the feature anyways? If it's such a bloated mess that this kind of small feature causes maintenance issues and a lot of effort to include in subsequent releases, then maybe it is time for Firefox to fail.
Sigh, I've been using Firefox for almost 2 decades, and this is the first I've heard of this feature.
Firefox would have no users at all if Mozilla abandon us nerds and power users who all rely a slightly different set of Firefox's obscure features. If Mozilla were smart, they would embrace us instead of wishing we were more like normal users (if we were, we'd be using chrome already!)
If you only focus on the most popular features you eventually narrow your product to one feature, so obviously there is a balance in there somewhere between focus and utility as well. Identifying why people use your product is as important as knowing what they use. Chrome does all the things I actually use from Firefox, but I use Firefox because when I ever need slightly more hackability it is there for me. That is at best, a once a year occurance.
I see this so much so, it's to the point that If I see you're using something else, I assume you're not a developer, and you're likely not a power user.
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
I second this. I've had the very rare message saying the tab tree has gotten out of sync (always as a consequence of me moving tabs between incognito windows), but the first time it happened clicking the message refreshed the tab tree successfully; the second time it didn't but toggling the sidebar off and on fixed it. I've had no problems with stability.
And to me the context menu option to unload tabs is a killer feature.
It became slow and the only reason that was keeping me in Firefox (TST) started getting more and more broken so I switched. I used to be so vocal about TST back in the days that I’m probably the reason you use it btw.
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.
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.
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.
I use Firefox mainly because of TreeStyleTab which lets me have 1k-2k tabs with no problem. Beats all other vertical tab options I've seen so far in other browsers
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.
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].
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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
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.
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.
It's been around in some form in most major browsers for decades. I remember Creating custom search entries in Firefox (or was it Phoenix still at that point?) in the early 2000's.
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
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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)
I used to use the asterisk a lot in college when I kept a larger collection of bookmarks for class related resources. These days I really don't use book marks as much. I feel like the majority of my repeated browsing experience ends up on HN, GitHub, and our logging service.
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.
This only works if you put the special character in the beginning and not at the end e.g. if I type "hacker news %" it still only filters by open tabs, but it doesn't show the "Tabs x" label (whether I add a space or not). Which is how I use it 99% of the time, since I only need to add special characters if it wasn't already finding what I meant without them.
(Not that I mind personally, since I'm already familiar with the feature)
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.
Another tip: it is still possible to add custom searches to the address bar in firefox. For example if you want to search algolia by date, you can add a bookmark https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... and add a keyword @hndate, and invoke it with @hndate Firefox Address Bar Tips.
Similarly you can run javascript programs on a site with a parameter from the url bar, if you want. For example you can make a bookmark with the URL
Doesn't the mobile port use a completely different user interface implementation, from scratch? Makes sense that they might not have gotten to all the advanced convenience features of desktop yet.
I use the shortcuts and address bar extensively - they made me a quick bookmarker and more often I gauge what I have indexed on a topic prior to do a websearch. With "+" you can have more than one tag to narrow down a list if it has multiple tags. While just using history+fuzzysearch works for a lot of people, I'm browsing too much to have a small list when using the history on often used terms - thus bookmarks and tagging.
The '+' tag search never really works for me in a satisfying way. I'd expect to be shown results that match only the tag I ask for, but frustratingly I always get bookmarks mixed in that match in the title and URLs.
is this due to "bestmatch" suggestions being shown first? I turned off alot (and made the results rather long) to get more out of it. These are modified values from the defaults:
so I tried a url that works on my local network and is in my history, bookmarks etc. Every single one of those modifiers sent that hostname with the modifier to my default search engine.
Maybe it doesn't play nicely, or at all with privacy badger, ublock origin, ddg etc plugins installed?
For me, using it as it is described in the examples also does not work, instead I have to hit space after the modifier, then the address bar will go into the correct mode and the UI shows this as well.
It also works with pasting to the address bar, but the space between modifier and term seems to be required.
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.
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 among the Hacker News audience.
The UI doesn't let you turn off searching from the address bar. It does let you choose to have a separate search box, but that doesn't seem to alter the address bar's behaviour. And when you do disable search with about:config the prompt still reads "Search with Bing or enter address".
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!
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!
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
Alt-d is, AFAIK, equivalent to a menubar shortcut (like Alt-f) that just happens to go to not quite a menu. None of the others close on repeat, so it doesn't either. UX consistency, though maybe the sort that doesn't matter as much as usual.
In Windows' File Explorer, F6 cycles focus between window sub-regions, while Alt+D sends you unconditionally to the address bar independent of where the focus is. So maybe there is a parallel here.
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"
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
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…
That's really cool! But perhaps this should be made discoverable by e.g. showing the tokens or just a list of different search options somehow (right clicking the address bar, or a small button on it you can press, ...)
BTW something I really dislike about firefox is the switch to tab behavior when your bookmark/url happens to match an open tab: I guess it tries to be economical and bring you to a tab where you already have that page open. But that means switching context to another window or even virtual desktop for me. Also sometimes maybe I want to keep the other tab at its current state? I wish this behavior could be disabled, it has almost never been what I wanted.
I think you can use control-enter to open a new tab instead. But with Firefox open right now I searched for several open things and it didn't offer to switch tabs. I've usually only seen that when searching tabs with % though.
This is great, but I can't never remember these shortcuts, or others useful FF shortcuts, "?" should have been a shortcut to a help page listing this kind of things, or maybe there is already such page I'm not aware of.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
330 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 2049 ms ] threadHaha! 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 :)
When I called it "the hamburger menu", I got confused stares. Maybe if the top line looked more like the top of a hamburger bun… although why a hamburger should mean "menu" is still a bit odd.
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 search ebay".
I know I can set them up manually (a pain, but might be worth the investment to avoid the google overlord), however, I still don't get the "tab to search blah" function with a keyword. I have to type the keyword exactly -instead of having tab function as autocomplete- then space for my query.
What I want is omnibox tab to search.
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.
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.
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.
As usual, there used to be an add-on for that, which was subsequently broken by the move to webextensions (and even if somebody wanted to rewrite it, the webextension API doesn't cater for its full functionality). Thankfully some kind soul has maintained a version hacked to still work even on a current Firefox (https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/tree/master...).
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
Still awesome though.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=firefox%20address%20bar
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.
I've found this random tutorial how to mass create Edge search engines by editing the Edge database https://jeffhandley.com/2022-10-17/custom-search-engines if you want to store your search engines in a separate file in the future
https://www.ghacks.net/2022/01/13/use-all-of-duckduckgos-ban...
https://github.com/jameshealyio/bang-bookmarks/
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".
Edit: it then gets saved as a bookmark and you can edit it like any other.
edit: also if I modify a keyword for my opensearch/xml search engines in about:preferences#search , it won't show up as a regular bookmark. Also I can't even see the URL for those search engines.
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...
It is also great for keyword-based bookmarklets.
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95426
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.
I also just saw this https://blog.google/products/chrome/search-your-tabs-bookmar...
I think I like the shorter Firefox version better but this is maybe easier to remember at first
I'm sitting here, recalling all my chats and meetings and workshops with UX folk, and not once can I recall the topic of keyboard shortcuts or tab sequence being brought up. It was all about color, branding, spacing, user flow, "journeys", "experience", conversion funnels, and all things visual.
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.
Another member recommended disabling hardware acceleration so that is the first thing I'll try. If you have any other recommendations on how I can reduce the impact of the issue I'd love to hear them.
I would have assumed that offloading the video processing to the dedicated GPU would be a good thing, but hopefully that helps with the problem.
That irritating and horrible; but until they follow that trend to conclusion, it's not a reason to switch at all.
Everyone is there for a different minority used feature. By caring only about the feature used by the majority, you are actually satisfying no one.
That’s why product managers use persona on top of metrics. Nice products have niche features and some kind of personality. You don’t want to overfocus on them but stripping them all is a losing move.
Sigh, I've been using Firefox for almost 2 decades, and this is the first I've heard of this feature.
If you only focus on the most popular features you eventually narrow your product to one feature, so obviously there is a balance in there somewhere between focus and utility as well. Identifying why people use your product is as important as knowing what they use. Chrome does all the things I actually use from Firefox, but I use Firefox because when I ever need slightly more hackability it is there for me. That is at best, a once a year occurance.
I see this so much so, it's to the point that If I see you're using something else, I assume you're not a developer, and you're likely not a power user.
And to me the context menu option to unload tabs is a killer feature.
Have I missed something?
I still manage to use TST, but part of my reason for using Firefox is just because I don't want to use anything Chromium based.
Oh, and also I don't really want to support Mozilla either so I am experimenting with LibreWolf as my secondary browser and so far it has been great.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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:
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.
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.
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).
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/
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.
https://itsbehnam.com/Brave-Hacks-I-Create-my-Own-Custom-Sea...
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).
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://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html
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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=firefox%20address%20bar
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.
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.
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)
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
These are just power user shortcuts.
(Not that I mind personally, since I'm already familiar with the feature)
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.
Similarly you can run javascript programs on a site with a parameter from the url bar, if you want. For example you can make a bookmark with the URL
and add a keyword @addBefore and it will work. (Useless example, but it probably show where and how the javascript runs.)https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/compone... https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/compone...
I get a lot out of this
Maybe it doesn't play nicely, or at all with privacy badger, ublock origin, ddg etc plugins installed?
It also works with pasting to the address bar, but the space between modifier and term seems to be required.
Followed by frequent calls for dumping Chrome in favor of Firefox.
^ to search for matches in your browsing history.
* to search for matches in your bookmarks.
? to search your search engine.
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.
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...
That is useful! Wonder why Ctrl-l and alt-d don't work like that?
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"
BTW something I really dislike about firefox is the switch to tab behavior when your bookmark/url happens to match an open tab: I guess it tries to be economical and bring you to a tab where you already have that page open. But that means switching context to another window or even virtual desktop for me. Also sometimes maybe I want to keep the other tab at its current state? I wish this behavior could be disabled, it has almost never been what I wanted.
The canonical URL for how the address bar short cuts is https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet...
this is not sarcasm. so often i have wished for something like this. and now i know that it exists!
sincerely, a long time firefox user
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.
It's an awkward solution, but it does work and is relatively quick.
I think I found your problem.
Although if you are really opening 400 tabs at once I'd recommend either tree-style tabs or rethinking your life choices lol.
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.
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.