[HN Gopher] Firefox address bar
___________________________________________________________________
Firefox address bar
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 821 points
Date : 2023-07-10 13:30 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wiki.tilde.institute)
(TXT) w3m dump (wiki.tilde.institute)
| doe88 wrote:
| 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.
| jahabrewer wrote:
| I'd LOVE if there was a way to select the first Firefox Suggest
| result immediately instead of having to wade through search
| suggestions with down arrow. I _think_ Chrome has this?
| kbrosnan wrote:
| In the search settings disable "Show search suggestions ahead
| of browsing history in address bar results"
| Tomte wrote:
| Unfortunately, it's not implemented on iOS/iPadOS.
| xk_id wrote:
| Wait until you find out about Tridactyl [0], which, among a
| plethora of other features, can activate a command line where you
| can perform all these searches (for example, `:taball` will list
| and activate fuzzy search of all opened tabs).
|
| [0] https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl
| account-5 wrote:
| I think this is the first time I've seen Firefox mentioned on the
| front page of HN and it's being praised instead of slated.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Firefox is the only browser here that gets praised even for
| periodic updates.
|
| Followed by frequent calls for dumping Chrome in favor of
| Firefox.
| wazoox wrote:
| I still enable the search bar, that you reach with Ctrl+K, while
| Ctrl+L sends you to the address bar.
| m3at wrote:
| Those prefix are great and I use them regularly!
|
| 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.
| bugmen0t wrote:
| There's also @ for steering the browser to a specific search
| engine (e.g., wikipedia search).
|
| The canonical URL for how the address bar short cuts is
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet...
| Santosh83 wrote:
| 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.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Exactly. Just give us a way to set which results we want first.
| paol wrote:
| That's why there's a UI affordance for it: look at the bottom
| of the suggestions list.
|
| These are just power user shortcuts.
| seaal wrote:
| I wish the tags would automatically populate when you used
| one of the shortcuts just as they do when you click on the
| UI.
| dao- wrote:
| There should be no difference between the two ways if you
| enter a space after the special character.
| Liquid_Fire wrote:
| 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)
| sixothree wrote:
| 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.
| Liquid_Fire wrote:
| You could use the GUI buttons that appear at the bottom of
| the suggestions - they even show the respective special
| character in the tooltip.
| nashashmi wrote:
| MS edge has similar address bar prefixes to limit suggestions to
| particular scopes like history, bookmarks, etc.
| nness wrote:
| "?" is a very useful if your search is being treated as a URL
| instead of a search query, i.e. if you need to search for
| something which ends in ".io"
| timvisee wrote:
| Firefox's QuantumBar is amazing stuff! One of the main features
| why I'm sticking with the browser. Makes it super comfy.
|
| Some time back I wrote on it as well, along with some extra
| goodies: https://timvisee.com/blog/firefox-tricks-quantumbar/
| jiripospisil wrote:
| 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.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| For me it's the history of visited addresses. I can navigate
| the tree of urls typing very little. It feels like a trie.
| coldpie wrote:
| > Awesomebar
|
| 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 :)
| kulahan wrote:
| Heh, this was a fun fact to learn. Had no idea they stopped
| using it. Thanks for sharing!
| millzlane wrote:
| It will always be the awesomebar to me. And I'll never stop
| calling the hamburger menu, The Hamburger Menu.
| archontes wrote:
| All I want is tab to search. Actual, identical-to-omnibar tab
| to search.
| [deleted]
| kibwen wrote:
| 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?
| archontes wrote:
| 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.
|
| What I _want_ is omnibox tab to search.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> 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.
| Vinnl wrote:
| 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.
| aftbit wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Actual search or autofill segment?
|
| 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.
| peppermint_gum wrote:
| > 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.
| mitchell209 wrote:
| This was my biggest gripe when I used a MacBook 6 years ago.
| You're telling me this issue still persists in current
| versions of Safari? Ridiculous.
| dpacmittal wrote:
| I agree, Firefox address bar is miles ahead of any other
| browser. I just hope they don't mess it up in the name of UX
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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!" ...
| sdfghswe wrote:
| Same here. I have a lot of bookmarks, and the bar finds it.
| darkwater wrote:
| 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)
| _shantaram wrote:
| 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.
| doodlesdev wrote:
| 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.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| 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.
| diroussel wrote:
| How can we get people to do more searches?
|
| Answer: don't show anymore than three history suggestion
| items and provide no way to increase it
| [deleted]
| cubefox wrote:
| 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.
| rkangel wrote:
| 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.
| capableweb wrote:
| > 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.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| 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...).
| nmridul wrote:
| 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.
| lousken wrote:
| 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.
| doodlesdev wrote:
| 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.
| ringer wrote:
| > You can search across tabs using the tab search in the top
| right corner though (an arrow pointing down).
|
| Which uses the same broken stuff, so you can't actually
| search. Check this ticket:
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1479858
|
| Btw, the arrow icon cannot be moved from the tabs bar,
| annoying because I completely hide this bar, but sometimes it
| would be useful to have this menu.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| _If I have 400 tabs open_
|
| I think I found your problem.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Ever since browsers made the URL bar a search bar, it really
| messes with "naked TLD's" like https://ai
| vladxyz wrote:
| In firefox you can split the url bar from the search bar, to
| make the intent explicit. Additionally, you can set
| _browser.fixup.dns_first_for_single_words_ to _true_ in
| _about:config_ , after which typing _ai_ in the url bar will
| offer to "visit" _http://ai/_ as the default option.
| penguin_booze wrote:
| Very annoying indeed. I had to force myself to type a trailing
| / so "naked TLDs" are resolved correctly.
| mpawelski wrote:
| I've been using % for years for switching to open tabs that I
| lost among many other opened tabs and windows.
|
| Pro tip: you can also append % at the end to have the same result
| (it wasn't always like that, which used to be super annoying if
| you forgot to type it at beginning).
| guptarohit wrote:
| I'm curious if we have something similar for chromium based
| browsers?
| sam_goody wrote:
| 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.
| marccoup wrote:
| 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
| diroussel wrote:
| 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.
| cassepipe wrote:
| 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
| wincy wrote:
| Firefox updated the other day and started putting ads into my
| address bar when I search for stuff. "Firefox Sponsored
| Suggestions" or some other such nonsense. I had to look up how to
| disable it. At least I could.
|
| I'm noticing the Google Omnibar will pop up logos and names of
| companies when I search for stuff which I wish I could disable.
| But I've found no way to do so. It's just distracting and
| jarring.
| [deleted]
| shadytrees wrote:
| Apropos of nothing, except that it shows off that Firefox
| implements the OpenSearch spec correctly, here's a Wordle clone
| my friend Nolen built in Firefox's address bar:
|
| https://eieio.games/nonsense/implementing-wordle-in-the-fire...
|
| I hope it brings you the five minutes of delight that it brought
| me
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Parade, here comes the rain. I hate who I've become these days,
| only ever complaining about stuff, but here we go:
|
| I find "^history search" to be actually and _annoyingly_ useless
| because Firefox, like Chrome and seemingly every other browser,
| has unreliable, short-living browsing history. The times where I
| find myself trying to use the "^-search" in Firefox are always
| just a little bit after whatever I was searching for fell out of
| history retention window. The annoyance part is that my every
| failed attempt at using "^-search" is another reminder that
| browser vendors seem to want to get rid of browsing history
| entirely.
|
| The rest of those tools, they work for me. Sometimes. "%tab-
| search" and "#title-search" seem to be negatively affected by
| what the article describes as "some sort of smart guess on what
| you type there", and overall I had them fail to find the exact
| tab/page I had open enough times, that I don't trust them.
|
| "+tag search" - that's a new one for me, I didn't know it
| existed. I only recently discovered you can add tags to
| bookmarks, and those tags do complete for "unqualified" queries
| (i.e. just starting to type in the address bar) with some
| priority, and are displayed nicely.
| aftbit wrote:
| What do you mean by "history retention window"? My Firefox
| instance has history dating back to 2016 at least...
| asadotzler wrote:
| You don't surf that much then. Kidding. It's not date based,
| but volume based and I have high volume so a smaller time
| window.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Mine doesn't, and it's not because I deleted it or anything.
| My current Fx history seems to go back some unspecified time
| over 6 months.
|
| Actually I started looking and found the hidden history
| manager view, which allowed me to at least view history as a
| table that can be sorted. It seems that my history goes back
| to 2021, which is more than I thought but much less than it
| should. And that's by "Most Recent Visit" column. There are
| two more hidden columns that can be enabled, "Added" and
| "Last Modified", but both have no values for any entry in
| history.
|
| As for search - I picked a history entry at random (literally
| dragged the scroll bar 2/3 of the way down and focused on
| first line that caught my attention), and attempted to find
| it in the address bar using "^-search" with words taken
| directly from the page title. The entry I was looking for
| showed only on the third attempt, and then it took two more
| before it stopped disappearing when I typed in the next word
| from its title. This suggests some kind of slow, async
| background search is going on - which would explain why it
| never worked for me: I never expected something like this
| could take more than an instant, especially without any
| indicator saying "still searching" or whatever.
|
| So I guess maybe it "works", it's just slow enough to be
| useless.
| phatfish wrote:
| I _think_ linking to a Firefox account will truncate your
| local history to the maximum retention of Firefox Sync,
| which is 1 year or a size limit. It 's pretty lame if that
| is the behaviour.
|
| I seem to get variable retentions between computers. For
| instance i have FF on a work laptop with sync blocked, and
| have purple links and history from 6+ years ago.
|
| FF on my personal machines which have been synced at one
| time or another certainly don't have 6 years of history.
| DangerousPie wrote:
| Interesting. I use ^history all the time and it has been
| working extremely well for me. It's the number one thing I miss
| every time I use Chrome.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| On chrome - Command-Y searches history. However typing in the
| address bar searches your history, open tabs, etc all at
| once. That's all I ever use. I get pretty much everywhere in
| 3 or 4 keystrokes.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I've used Firefox for over two decades at this point. I didn't
| know about these modifiers and I find that pretty awesome. For
| years I've had a few of my own quick searches set up, for example
| "wp thing" will take me to the Wikipedia page for "thing".
|
| I realised recently I've taken the Firefox address bar for
| granted. I wasn't a big fan when it moved from a "simple" address
| bar. I still use a separate search bar and disable searching from
| the address bar in case I accidentally submit a search I didn't
| intend to.
|
| But recently I was using Safari on an iPad and couldn't believe
| how terrible it was. It couldn't even remember pages I'd visited
| from a couple of days ago. I do bookmark things in Firefox but
| I've taken for granted being able to recall pages I've browsed
| months, maybe even years, ago from the address bar. How do people
| live without this?!
| TheArcane wrote:
| As someone who loves Multi-Account Containers, as long as this
| bug[1] isn't fixed, the address bar is severely handicapped for
| me
|
| [1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1479858
| elwell wrote:
| In Chrome, prefix with '?' to search Google instead of
| autocompleting.
| aloisdg wrote:
| Nice usage of watercss
| seren wrote:
| I love them, use them every day on desktop and I don't understand
| why it does not work on mobile
| rsapkf wrote:
| The latest Firefox mobile update added a dropdown to the
| address bar for switching search engines and searching through
| history/bookmarks/tabs easily.
| seren wrote:
| Nice, I hadn't seen it, thanks !
| LoganDark wrote:
| 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.
| nothingeasy wrote:
| Yes, the mobile address bar is a completely different
| implementation from the desktop version.
| poorman wrote:
| I really wish there was an easy way to search text in all open
| tabs on Chrome / Brave.
| NikkiA wrote:
| 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.
| seaal wrote:
| A subset of the most personally useful modifiers work on Edge and
| I prefer the UI when using these in Edge.
|
| ^ to search for matches in your browsing history.
|
| * to search for matches in your bookmarks.
|
| ? to search your search engine.
| tonylemesmer wrote:
| My favourite find of the past 12 months is Ctrl+L which gives the
| address bar focus so you can begin typing.
| ris58h wrote:
| It's not possible to focus back which is a bummer.
| kbrosnan wrote:
| You can use F6 to focus the address bar. With it focused F6
| will return focus to web content.
| arrakeen wrote:
| 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
| quikoa wrote:
| I'm using alt+d what I like about that shortcut is that's on
| the left side and the keys are close to each other.
| aftbit wrote:
| Don't forget about Ctrl-Enter which converts <word> to
| http://www.<word>.com
| sphars wrote:
| Huh, didn't know about Ctrl+L, I've always used Alt+D for
| address bar focus.
| fivre wrote:
| Alt-d is superior, since it's a left-hand shortcut!
|
| Even though the keys _are_ there I have no muscle memory for
| the modifiers on my right hand.
| tonylemesmer wrote:
| wow - now we have 3 shortcuts for the same thing!
| asadotzler wrote:
| Alt D (from IE) also works. Ctrl L is Netscape legacy.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| FYI, CTRL+L actually works in a lot of contexts. Chrome,
| Windows Explorer, Dolphin, Slack, and probably many others!
| guptarohit wrote:
| Welcome to the club!
|
| 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.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Alt F4 is for duplicating the window with all of its tabs. /s
| nashashmi wrote:
| Kids, never learn keyboard shortcuts from strangers in the
| internet
| 369548684892826 wrote:
| Also ctrl-shift-t to undo close tab
| penguin_booze wrote:
| 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!
| benplumley wrote:
| F6 works too, and you can press it again to unfocus it (TIL)
| chimprich wrote:
| > and you can press it again to unfocus it
|
| That is useful! Wonder why Ctrl-l and alt-d don't work like
| that?
| fivre wrote:
| 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.
| KSecurityK wrote:
| While doing a search in search engine you can use `/` to go to
| the search bar, this also works in YouTube.
|
| In Firefox use this for quick find on the page
| vladxyz wrote:
| One finger over, and you've got Ctrl+K to focus search bar (if
| you have it enabled. Becomes default-search-engine-search in
| the address bar, if not).
| ngc6677 wrote:
| There is also client side configuration possible with
| https://github.com/internet4000/find
| Liam2010 wrote:
| [flagged]
| amelius wrote:
| I personally like Amazon's approach, where there is a dropdown
| menu in front of the search bar where you can select if you want
| to search in "Books", "Electronics", etc.
| pieter_mj wrote:
| Am I the only one to accidentally paste my main firefox password
| into the address bar and having it searched by google?
| Liam2010 wrote:
| [dead]
| pmontra wrote:
| 12. about:performance to view how much each tab consumes power
| and memory, in real time, jump to it and do something. It works
| on Android too.
|
| Useful for normal navigation and in development when under some
| circumstances one of our apps enter some CPU busy loop. I got a
| very busy websocket recently, when the user session expires.
| perihelions wrote:
| 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
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=firefox%20address%20bar
| johnnyworker wrote:
| 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).
| raybb wrote:
| I implemented it for OpenLibrary
| (https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/pull/5104)
| and it was surprisingly easy and works well!
| cubefox wrote:
| 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.
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| 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
|
| [0] https://github.com/gregsadetsky/custom-search-engines
| cpleppert wrote:
| 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.
| robbyking wrote:
| 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.
| tomphoolery wrote:
| is it really a "shame"? opera is the oldest successful
| browser of all time.
| kbenson wrote:
| 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.
| jessriedel wrote:
| My list:
|
| 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.
| momothereal wrote:
| 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!
| anilit99 wrote:
| Chase?
| momothereal wrote:
| No but I'm sure many big orgs to this! Much easier than
| updating a home page with 1000+ links
| pjot wrote:
| This is a feature in Chrome as well!
|
| https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95426
| viewtransform wrote:
| 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.
| kevincox wrote:
| Yup, I use this all the time. `d` is for searching my favourite
| D&D reference, `i` is for IMDB, `p` is for image search, `v` is
| for GIF search...
|
| It is also great for keyword-based bookmarklets.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| 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.
| a_c wrote:
| 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.
| naturalpb wrote:
| I love DDG's bangs. If I want to see Google results, I use !s
| for Startpage instead. It's Google results through
| Startpage's search proxy.
| asadotzler wrote:
| I wrote all about this kind of thing back in 2001 or so
|
| https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html
| FalconSensei wrote:
| this is just the search engines feature on chrome...
| bmacho wrote:
| 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 javascript:
| document.body.innerHTML = "%s" + document.body.innerHTML
|
| and add a keyword @addBefore and it will work. (Useless
| example, but it probably shows where and how the javascript
| runs.)
| bshacklett wrote:
| 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.
| rascul wrote:
| 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.
| notRobot wrote:
| I think you can have the keywords begin with a # or a @ or a
| ! (a la DDG bangs).
| [deleted]
| usea wrote:
| you can make another keyword search for your search engine,
| and use that instead of a naked search. like: "g hn firefox
| address bar"
| velut wrote:
| You can press Ctrl+K or type a `?` before the search query
| and Firefox will use your default search engine without
| expanding the bookmark macro.
| rascul wrote:
| 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!
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Mobile used to have this too until they ruined it. And now they
| won't add it back with no valid justification.
| atomlib wrote:
| This is Firefox's best kept secret.
|
| To this day I cannot fathom anyone willingly switching from
| Firefox to Chrome/Edge/any other Chromium-based browser. There
| are so many tiny features that are useful at least to myself,
| while a minor JavaScript performance advantage isn't something
| that important in the grand scale of things.
| baby wrote:
| 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
| kenmacd wrote:
| Well, in case you decide to move back, give Sidebery a try.
| I switched a while back haven't had any issues.
| eitland wrote:
| So, if I understood you correct, you had issues with TST
| and instead of disabling TST, you went for Chrome?
| fn-mote wrote:
| They want a good tab manager... so they changed because
| the one they tried for Firefox did not work.
| eitland wrote:
| Over to Chrome that - as far as I have found - is worse
| off than Firefox in all possible ways when it comes to
| tab management?
|
| Have I missed something?
| raytube wrote:
| [dead]
| sucralose wrote:
| 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.
| asadotzler wrote:
| I've been trying to tell people about this for over two
| decades, literally, https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-
| user/keywords.html
| pbreit wrote:
| Chrome manages to do this without a command character. Much
| better UX.
| tzot wrote:
| 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.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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.
| Neff wrote:
| 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.
| irae wrote:
| I used Safari for years and it is so easy to open Chrome
| just for Google Meet. It is way less annoying than one
| would imagine
| thesuitonym wrote:
| I wonder if Google would have any vested interest in making
| Meets a bad experience in Firefox... No, it must be Firefox
| that's wrong!
| raytube wrote:
| [dead]
| paintballboi07 wrote:
| Have you tried disabling hardware acceleration?
| drozycki wrote:
| Chrome would auto install site specific search in its initial
| beta release in September 2008. The ability to set your own
| keywords came soon after. https://lifehacker.com/enable-
| chromes-best-features-in-firef...
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| sbjs wrote:
| And rightfully so. Why maintain a feature for a small
| minority? Let them fork and maintain it themselves.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| The danger of this is obvious.
|
| 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.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| 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!)
| zo1 wrote:
| "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.
| [deleted]
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Switching will accelerate this.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Firefox is trending into the unfriendliness of Chrome and
| the other mainstream browsers.
|
| That irritating and horrible; but until they follow that
| trend to conclusion, it's not a reason to switch at all.
| wartijn_ wrote:
| You can do this in Chromium as well. So it might be
| Chromium's best kept secret too.
| NikkiA wrote:
| As far as I know, you can do it in all major browsers
| (probably not safari though)
| pivo wrote:
| There's a plugin that does this for Safari:
| https://apps.apple.com/app/keyword-search/id1558453954
| sxg wrote:
| 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.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| 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
| ghostpepper wrote:
| How does one search open tabs in Chrome?
| cubefox wrote:
| I think he meant the custom website keyword search.
| wartijn_ wrote:
| I did mean that, but it is possible to search for tabs,
| history, or bookmarks by starting your search with an @.
| E.g. `@tabs ycombinator`
| cpleppert wrote:
| This bookmarklet will work: (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='ht
| tp://www.google.com/search?&q=site:'+encodeURIComponent(h
| na)+'+'+escape(Qr) }})();
|
| You can attach to a keyboard shortcut with a launcher or
| applescript.
| wartijn_ wrote:
| By starting your search with "@tabs" You can change that
| behavior in the settings
| myfonj wrote:
| Interestingly, in Microsoft Edge, entering `%` does the
| same as typing `@tabs <tab>`. And `^` as `@history`.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| Ctrl+shift+a or click that little arrow at the top right
| of the window and you can search there.
|
| 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
| mucle6 wrote:
| I thought I was a power user....
| zo1 wrote:
| 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.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Ctrl+Shift+A works in Edge too, they don't have the caret
| as a search dialog handle though. TIL. Includes recently
| closed tabs too.
| shscs911 wrote:
| Ctrl+Shift+A
| IceSentry wrote:
| 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.
| aldanor wrote:
| 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
| nine_k wrote:
| Another great thing that only seem to exist for Firefox is
| Tree Style Tab [1] and a bunch of plugins around it. It
| completely changes the way I browse.
|
| There is an honest but much, much more limited attempt top
| bring a something similar to Chromium: [2].
|
| [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-
| style-ta...
|
| [2]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tree-style-
| tab/oic...
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| This thread really makes me miss old
| vimperator/pentadactyl.,
| MetallicCloud wrote:
| 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.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| 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.
| nine_k wrote:
| Indeed. Works for me, but I'd love it to be an
| about:config setting for power users, or maybe even a
| View menu item.
| nine_k wrote:
| Finding the profile directory is as easy as opening
| about:support (also available via the Help menu).
| wlesieutre wrote:
| 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.
| velut wrote:
| I don't think so. I use Sidebery and their recommended
| approach is to edit userChrome.css. It's not too bad and
| works well. See
| https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/wiki/Firefox-Styles-
| Snipp....
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >a minor JavaScript performance advantage
|
| 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.
| velut wrote:
| This is one of my favorite features that I use daily.
|
| 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.
| gnomespaceship wrote:
| Btw if you also use DuckDuckGo, you can start your search
| with "!hn" and "!r" bangs: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
| ajot wrote:
| And you can go full circle, adding DDG's bangs as bookmark
| keywords on Firefox!
|
| https://www.ghacks.net/2022/01/13/use-all-of-duckduckgos-
| ban...
|
| https://github.com/jameshealyio/bang-bookmarks/
| [deleted]
| bmacho wrote:
| Me too, on Microsoft Edge. Until one day an update nuked away
| all of my custom search keywords :(
|
| This is probably less of a problem on firefox, where they are
| regular bookmarks.
| ckosidows wrote:
| Same happened to me recently. I lost my custom search
| keywords randomly one day
| bmacho wrote:
| 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
| ugh123 wrote:
| This is also available in Chrome!
| behnamoh wrote:
| I've been doing this on Brave for years.
|
| https://itsbehnam.com/Brave-Hacks-I-Create-my-Own-Custom-Sea...
| dugmartin wrote:
| This used to be baked into Chrome too but they removed it. I'm
| guessing to juice the Google search metrics.
|
| https://twitter.com/googlechrome/status/1504858912692084745
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| 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).
| girishso wrote:
| I don't see any "Keyword" field when creating bookmark, only
| "Tags".
| mcpackieh wrote:
| The easiest way is to right-click on a search field and
| select _" Add a Keyword for this Search"_
| brianpan wrote:
| 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.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| 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.
| girishso wrote:
| Yes, that did help, Thanks!
| yasenn wrote:
| Is there some mobile browser with the same macro feature for
| address bar?
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=firefox%20address%20bar
| ris58h wrote:
| Use it daily for GitHub code search (gh -
| https://github.com/search?type=code&q=%s).
| bombolo wrote:
| This has been available on kde for several years.
| bmacho wrote:
| 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".
| bejd wrote:
| Right-click on a search box > "Add a Keyword for this
| Search".
|
| Edit: it then gets saved as a bookmark and you can edit it
| like any other.
| bmacho wrote:
| 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.
| velut wrote:
| Right click inside a search box. There should be the
| option "Add a Keyword for this search".
| bmacho wrote:
| Where? What is a search box?
| velut wrote:
| The search input provided by a website. You can try with
| the one in the footer of Hacker News and it works. See
| https://imgur.com/oxqMw6D
| [deleted]
| zvmaz wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-
| custom-se...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| yannyu wrote:
| It's funny that this used to be a killer feature in Opera
| before they fell off. Between that and mouse gestures, they
| were really ahead of their time.
| unsungNovelty wrote:
| 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"
| jcul wrote:
| And they are also supported by kagi.
|
| It's nice that kagi lets you define your own, so I can have
| custom ones across browsers / mobile / desktop... So long as
| I'm logged in and have configured kagi to be my default
| search engine (my phone defaults to ddg and sometimes I might
| use a browser in a VM or something).
| Antipode wrote:
| !hn is also for hacker news
| conaclos wrote:
| I really like keywords. I use keywords for search engines and
| bookmarks. I created several ones to mirror DuckDuckGo bangs.
|
| 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.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| 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
| hankmander wrote:
| This is the killer feature that keeps me a ff user, now that
| browsers are so equal in performance.
| nullgeo wrote:
| The opposite is true in Chrome-- the address bar a little more
| than completely useless. I use it mostly for web development but
| this feature along with manifest v3 introduced by Chrome might
| make me switch to Firefox for good.
| flas9sd wrote:
| 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.
| nebalee wrote:
| 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.
| avg_dev wrote:
| oh god thank you
|
| 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
| spython wrote:
| Does anyone know how to delete entries from autosuggest in the
| address bar? Shift + delete does not seem to work on Mac..
| matsemann wrote:
| Seems to have stopped working on Windows as well. (Or was it
| shift+backspace? But neither works). However, hovering over the
| entry I get (...) I can press to remove. Not quick if wanting
| to do many.
|
| That reminds me, ctrl+shift+delete to delete history gives you
| a setting for "last hour", "today" etc. I wish I could have the
| opposite choices. Let me easily delete history, cookies etc for
| domains or something I haven't visited in X months.
| rvba wrote:
| Why isnt there a way to fix history.
|
| Say I have 50 sites about "headphones". I need to go through each
| of them to find thar particular one.
|
| So I open them one by one, but they land on top again and polute
| the search results.. what makes searching difficult.
| plingbang wrote:
| 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.
| seaal wrote:
| There is, create a private window and your history will be
| fixed.
| alextingle wrote:
| That is a legit useful tip. Thanks.
| sfink wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| DangerousPie wrote:
| It works fine without spaces for me.
| sfink wrote:
| 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....
| Aardwolf wrote:
| 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.
| mrj wrote:
| 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.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| There are buttons at the bottom of the address bar for
| Bookmarks, Tabs, and History, and they even show you the
| shortcuts.
| conaclos wrote:
| I really like this way of discovering new functionalities. It
| is how I discovered the bookmark searches via the star *.
| [deleted]
| sedatk wrote:
| These shortcuts work in Edge too:
|
| ^ -> searches in History
|
| % -> searches in Tabs
|
| * -> searches in Favorites
| freditup wrote:
| 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.
| dao- wrote:
| 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.
| masfuerte wrote:
| 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".
| [deleted]
| freditup wrote:
| 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!
| sergimansilla wrote:
| Ha, I've been using these for years, I thought it was better
| known!
| veaxvoid wrote:
| most of the time when i search errors, address bar thinks it's a
| site
| harry8 wrote:
| 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?
| __jonas wrote:
| 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.
| mrj wrote:
| You can turn of search suggestions if that's what you prefer.
| You can even have a dedicated search box instead of having
| address and search combined.
| adql wrote:
| All I want for this dumb thing is to
|
| * correct ttps:// to https://
|
| * stop searching internet for local hostname I type into the bar
| hexage1814 wrote:
| You probably could fix this using the extension "Redirector"
| and creating a filter for it..
| cobbaut wrote:
| > 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/ )
| aftbit wrote:
| Try "localname/" instead, though that will try https by
| default with my settings.
| tux1968 wrote:
| 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.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| 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.
| paintballboi07 wrote:
| Yeah, this actually screws up LastPass's URL matching.
| kikoreis wrote:
| That's fixable via browser.urlbar.trimURLs:
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/881261
| alextingle wrote:
| Now can they fix the URLbar so that focussing it doesn't weirdly
| select all. So frustrating when I want to edit a URL.
| YayaScript wrote:
| Is there anything similar in Safari?
| robbyking wrote:
| This plugin: https://apps.apple.com/app/keyword-
| search/id1558453954
| jjice wrote:
| 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.
| javajosh wrote:
| Great tips although I wish they'd link to the original source:
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet...
| everybodyknows wrote:
| There's a handy search box on the page. A query for "timeout"
| there leads to many calls for help, but few replies. This for
| instance: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1350502
| mxuribe wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this!
| tjoff wrote:
| 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.
| ajot wrote:
| Not a solution, but I can copy multiple tabs addresses with a
| tree style tabs addon, Sideberry.
| mormegil wrote:
| I would swear this was in the right-click menu when multiple
| tabs were selected? But maybe it was some extension.
| diarized wrote:
| That would be a job for a tab extension, wouldn't be? Like Tree
| Style Tab.
| watashiato wrote:
| 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.
| Jap2-0 wrote:
| I use a nice little Firefox extension (might also be available
| for Chrome) called TabList - it's about 20 lines of code and
| works great.
| nullcipher wrote:
| This is like perl but better
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