
Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox - abentspoon
http://qwerjk.com/posts/duck-duck-firefox/
======
Spittie
I'm glad to see more and more people switching (back) to Firefox, as I admit
I'm quite a Firefox fanboy.

I've never made the full switch to Chrome. First, as a long time linux user,
Firefox was never so bad on it (startup time, random freeze for i/o...).

Second, when Chrome was (a lot) faster Firefox had way more addons. Now Chrome
has kinda fixed that (I still miss some essential addons, like Tree Style
Tab), but Firefox is again about as fast as Chrome.

Regarding Google, I've found that it's result are often better than
DuckDuckGo. But I promised myself that sometime I'll make a week using only
DuckDuckGo, and see if I can survive without Google.

~~~
joeblau
I used DDG for two months and as a developer trying to find the latest bugs,
code snippets, and help; It was a lot harder on DDG than in Google. I would
always end up having to type google.com <tab> in my address bar to search for
programming related items. That being said, people have pointed me to
resources to help me improve my search results.

~~~
k-mcgrady
On DDG you can add !g to the start or end of a query and it will do the search
on Google.

~~~
Spittie
That's one of the best, and yet one of the worst feature of DuckDuckGo.

When I tried using it a while ago, I ended up always searching for "!g
<query>", since I knew I would always get equal or better results.

I'm glad it's this easy to search on Google from DuckDuckGo, but it also makes
the switch harder. Or, at least, it did for me.

~~~
k-mcgrady
I had the same problem. I switched to DDG and Firefox when the PRISM story
broke but ended up using !g on so many queries I made Google my default again.
I find Google much better when I'm searching for API docs, StackOverflow Q's
etc.

------
gnosis
I've been using DDG and Firefox for years now, and don't miss Google at all.

The main thing I'm really annoyed with DDG about is that they don't (no
longer?) treat double-quoted search terms as literal. I'll often get results
that are close to but not exactly what I asked for.

This is really frustrating, as my entire intention in double quoting search
terms is to ask for exactly those search terms and nothing else.

As far as DDG's privacy boasts go, I'd love to see them confirmed by frequent
audits from a trusted and respected entity like the EFF. For all we know, DDG
might be lying (or being forced to lie) about not tracking or spying on its
users and not handing over the data it collects on us to others.

My motto is: trust but verify. So far, there's no way to do that in the case
of DDG. Still, I'd much rather use a service that at least pays (pretty
convincing) lip service to respecting its users' privacy than services where
there's clear evidence of abuse and contempt for its users' privacy, such as
Google or Facebook.

~~~
hnriot
DDG is Bing with some front end work, why not just use Bing and then you can
use quotes searches without problem [1]

[1] [http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-
us/bing/ff524480.aspx](http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-
us/bing/ff524480.aspx)

~~~
gnosis
It's not just Bing.

 _" DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "about 50" sources, including
Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, its own Web crawler, the
DuckDuckBot, and others."_[1]

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duckduckgo#Features](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duckduckgo#Features)

~~~
mda
It is a meta search engine with lions share of queries answered by Yahoo! BOSS
(which is backed by Bing).

------
bhauer
I was surprised to see _praise_ for Chrome's omnibar here. The meddlesome
assumption that everything I type into the URL bar is or should be a Google
search drives me crazy when I use Chrome. By comparison, Firefox's URL bar
does an incredible job of matching fragments of URLs to my history and
bookmarks.

My personal project has the word "taskforce" in the domain and title. In
Firefox, I can type "task" and it's at the top of the options every single
time. One down arrow, enter, and done. Chrome puts it as option five under a
search for "task" and three predictive recommendations from Google's search
engine that start with "task" (none of which I have ever visited in Chrome).
"Taskstream log in"? I don't even know what that means.

Essentially everything I want to select in the omnibar is always several items
down the list. Very frustrating and inevitably one of the chief reasons I
close Chrome and switch back to Firefox.

~~~
mayanksinghal
Here are some of my Chrome autocompletes: n (news.ycombinator.com), mu
(music.google.com), ma (mail.google.com), a (amazon.com), gi (github.com), q
(quora.com), l (localhost), i (images.google.com), c (coursera.com). I don't
think I even give it a second thought after pressing these characters. I just
do 'n' and Return.

Your experience might be worse, probably because you haven't used chrome
enough.

~~~
bhauer
To be clear, if I start typing the _beginning_ of the domain name, Chrome will
correctly identify my intent. But if I type a _fragment_ of the URL (or
multiple fragments), it assumes I want to run a search.

In your example, you said "n" leads to news.ycombinator.com. In Firefox, "n"
leads to me to news.cnet.com, which I also visit fairly regularly. Meanwhile,
"yc", or "hac", or "nator" yield Hacker News. In Chrome, "yc" yields a
suggestion of "yc.edu" (whatever that is) and "hac" yields "hacked games."
Part of my distaste for this is that it reveals that everything I type into
the omnibar is sent to Google for analysis. I have _once_ accidentally pasted
a password into the omnibar field and had a sudden panic. I know it's Google,
and DBE, and all of that. But still.

Back to the fragments point, I might remember a site had something to do with
"combi" in the name. Type that into Firefox and it knows what I want, even if
I've only visited it once several months ago. Google thinks I want "combivent
respimat." No joke. Apparently it's a drug.

In fact, as I experiment right now, I can't even get Chrome to suggest
news.ycombinator.com by typing "combinator" into the omnibar. As a user of
Chrome I am _required_ to remember the domain started with 'y'. In Firefox,
the browser tries to help me.

As an exercise, can you tell us what sites are suggested when you type
"combinator", "host", "hub" (this one is an example of a plausible case--"It
was something-hub", type "hub", "oh yeah, _git_ hub!"), etc?

------
jlgaddis
> But the keyboard shortcuts mean I can ... without reaching for the mouse,
> and using a very limited set of shortcuts.

This is why I love vimperator[0]. I actually preferred pentadactyl[1] but
development apparently stalled so I switched back.

[0]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
us/firefox/addon/vimperator/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
us/firefox/addon/vimperator/)

[1]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
us/firefox/addon/pentadactyl/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
us/firefox/addon/pentadactyl/)

~~~
gnosis
As a long-time user of Pentadactyl, Firefox, and vim, I'd like to make the
heretical suggestion to try w3m in emacs.

Having a web browser fully integrated in to a powerful editor like that is
fantastic. It's far more powerful than what you'd get from the
Pentadactyl/Firefox combination, with the disadvantage that w3m can't handle
Javascript.[1]

w3m's also far faster and a lot less bloated than Firefox. For sites that work
without Javascript and where I only care about getting information in text
format (which is probalby 99% of the sites I use), it's just about perfect for
me. For the rest, I have Firefox, Opera, and Chromium as backups.

[1] This is not a big loss on most sites, as they can usually be used just
fine without it. In fact, it's often good to have Javascript turned off so as
to avoid Javascript exploits, tracking and advertising.

~~~
dredmorbius
The most annoying thing about w3m for me these days is the fonts in my default
terminal window. I've been shopping around for a better alternative (GNOME
terminal or XFCE4's terminal seem to beat my trusty old rxvt). The ability to
dynamically resize fonts is also kind of nice (yeah, I'm old school).

That and the fact that color settings for w3m are pretty hard to tweak just
right for whatever terminal / foreground/background you're using.

The fact that so many pages render _much_ more readably _without_ CSS is ....
sad, actually.

------
ibrahima
I can't believe someone misses Chrome's "Tiny Tab" thing, I think it's the
single most broken thing about the browser. In Firefox I used to use multi row
tabs and then Tree style tabs when I had too many tabs. In Chrome all I can do
is open a new window. I don't see what's useful at all about having 20 reddit
icons.

(pretty much switched to Chrome entirely because of web development and
Firefox taking too long to reload, but might switch back once I don't need to
do web dev for a while).

------
hillbillyjack
One really nice thing about firefox is no more He's Dead Jim pages.

Chrome (even stable) seems to crash tabs all the time, while in the past 6
months firefox nightly hasn't crashed more than a once or twice. Another
annoying thing about chrome is I never got a reason for a crash it just was a
crash page and if I tried to reload that page it was very likely to crash
silently again, with chrome at least I get the stop script dialog once in a
while.

Chrome still starts faster (more noticable on windows than linux). There are
also a plethora of webkit optimized experiments that don't work for shit on
firefox.

~~~
jlgaddis
> One really nice thing about firefox is no more He's Dead Jim pages.

It took me a minute to figure out what you were referring to then I realized I
haven't seen one of those in months -- since, I believe, I stopped using
Flash.

------
binarymax
I made the switch to DDG about 2 years ago and am pretty happy, though I do
occasionally use the !g.

Switched back to FF on my desktop a couple months ago when I got my keon and I
love it. The only thing that's hard to get used to again is a search bar
separate from an address bar. Chrome really had that figured out. A unified
bar in FF would make it the perfect browser.

~~~
k-mcgrady
When I was using Firefox I used this extension to unify the address/search
bars.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/omnibar/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/omnibar/)

~~~
bad_user
I don't use Omnibar, because by typing words into the address bar directly,
Firefox does do a search.

Also Firefox's address bar is much better at searching your history, saving
you from doing Google searches. For example you can type the words in the
titles of articles you've read and Firefox's AwesomeBar does a good job at
suggesting past entries.

This is awesome when you no longer remember the domain or url, but you
remember a word or two. In such instances searching on Google doesn't help
either.

This feature to me has been an epiphany actually. Google has no interest in
developing something like the AwesomeBar, because they'd rather see you doing
searches on Google instead.

~~~
snogglethorpe
> _Google has no interest in developing something like the AwesomeBar_

As far as I can tell, chrome's address-bar behavior _is_ trying to do
something like the FF "awesome bar", i.e., combine searches of past urls and
titles of pages you've visited, plus google search results, etc., into a
single DWIM-like result.

Chrome's results aren't as _good_ as FF's (I typically have to type more to
get what what I'm looking for, and the ordering is often not ideal), but it
does appear to have similar goals. Chrome used to be _much_ worse at this, but
seems to have improved somewhat over time.

As to why exactly FF's results are better, my guess is that it weights the
results differently, emphasizing pages you've visited often even if the match
is in the middle somewhere, whereas chrome seems to give prefix matches more
weight....

[I normally use FF, but use chrome occasionally too...]

------
baby
Things I advise you to install on Firefox : Tree Style Tab[1]

Basically what it does is display the tabs on the left, thus occupying a space
that is rarely used on websites (borders). It is so practical for managing
many tabs, nesting tabs etc... that I can't understand why a power user who
uses a lot of tabs would switch to chrome.

Just try to use it for a day or a week and it will change your life.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-
ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

~~~
dredmorbius
Tree style tabs. All-in-one sidebar. Vimperator. Ghostery. Adblock Plus.
Stylish (or Stylebot). I've come to rather love the latter under Chrome, which
I've been using increasingly lately. Readability. Torbutton.

That's off the top of my head, there's a few others I typically add.

My main problem with FF lately is that with _both_ FF (well, Iceweasel) and
Chromium installed, Chrome pigs out all available memory, while Firefox is
single-processed. While the _active_ Chrome tab usually frees up fairly
quickly if swapped, Firefox can literally take _minutes_ to dig itself out of
heavy swap.

Yeah, I still use spinning rust.

~~~
baby
There's Adblock Plus Pop-up which is a must have as well.

------
cupcake-unicorn
I actually never ended up switching to Chrome from Firefox in the first place,
but those are still good tips. I guess I did the right thing :)

Yes, it has a terrible memory leak issue, but all of my computers have enough
ram as to not notice.

I'm still not ready to make the switch to DuckDuckGo. I figure that if I'm
going to stick with Gmail no matter what, if Google already has that
information, collecting a few search queries is nothing.

Also, perhaps I'm missing something, but as far as I can tell Chrome is at
least partially open source, no? [http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-
tos/get-the-code](http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/get-the-code)

Why aren't people forking it to create a more privacy friendly version?

~~~
Watabou
There aren't any memory leak issues in Firefox. I have been using Firefox
since Firefox 10 and it has made huge strides in memory performance so much so
that it beats every browser out there on memory benchmarks.

In fact, on the mac, with the same number (34) of tabs, the same content, no
add-ons or extensions, Firefox takes 600MB - 800MB, Safari takes around
900MB-1GB and Chrome takes around 900-1.2GB. I use these browsers every day
and I have the same results every day.

I have the same tabs open now in Firefox, all 34 of them and it's only taking
740MB. You just can't beat that. It's really awesome.

~~~
lttlrck
None of that points to the absence of memory leaks.

(I'm not saying Firefox has memory leaks. Though it's extremely unlikely it
has none, same goes for Chrome and Safari)

------
area51org
As a Mac guy, I switched back to Firefox when Chrome became practically
unusable (slow, crashy). Pleasant surprise: Firefox is snappier and much-
evolved since I last used it.

Haven't tried DuckDuckGo yet, but I know my day is coming.

~~~
hnriot
This makes no sense. I, like many people here use a Mac and Chrome and can't
remember the last time it crashed. I suspect this is something specific to
your installation, possibly a rogue plugin you've installed.

My experience is quite the opposite to yours. neither ff or chrome crash much,
and chrome is significantly faster.

~~~
area51org
On my system -- and I've tried everything I could think of, including blowing
away my profile -- it's slow, crashy, and hangs a lot. It's a newish Macbook
Pro with plenty of disk and RAM.

FF, on the other hand, is faster (!) and doesn't crash often.

------
JefWin
Are people switching to DuckDuckGo simply because of paranoia? I don't care if
Google knows whatever I'm searching for, it helps them improve their search
results. DuckDuckGo's search is nowhere near as good as Google.

------
jnbiche
I also made this switch, and am slowly trying to find my way off of Google
services (mostly gmail).

I really like Chrome, and might have stayed with Chromium if there had been an
easy to install bookmark and password sync server I could run like Firefox has
with Weave (for obvious reasons, I no longer want my sync data centralized
with Google). Chromium apparently has a server you can run at home, but I
couldn't for the life of me figure out how to do it. In addition, Chrome for
Android has no support for self-hosted sync, so unlike with Firefox I couldn't
sync my mobile devices even if I could set up a self-hosted server.

With Firefox, hosting your own sync server is trivial: there are even several
different implementations of the Weave server besides Mozilla.

I miss Chrome, since I was very happy with the performance and dev tools, but
I've made my decision and will live with it (except when I need to test web
development stuff in Chrome).

------
tempestn
DDG's obviously gotten a massive boost from this whole issue:
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=duckduckgo](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=duckduckgo)

I was a bit surprised that Firefox hasn't:
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox)

but obviously it has a lot more inertia. (Or maybe everyone switches to DDG
first, and THEN looks for Firefox, so Google Trends doesn't know about it...)

~~~
hayksaakian
it _is_ the #1 related term (duckduckgo firefox)

as of just now

also compare them:
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox#q=firefox%2C...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox#q=firefox%2C%20duckduckgo&cmpt=q)

firefox jumped about as much as ddg recently, but that's a blip on firefox as
a whole

~~~
tempestn
Ya, that's what I meant by the 'inertia' of Firefox. It takes a lot to move
the needle on it. The comparison is definitely illustrative though.

(The part about everyone finding Firefox on DDG was a joke.)

------
teaneedz
I made this switch myself recently. The web dev tools in FF are still a bit
weak in pseudo areas and media queries but I'm living with it for now. BTW,
why doesn't Firefox have "paste & match style"?

DDG is also my go-to search engine.

Personally, I feel better supporting Mozilla and DDG more.

------
amenod
Two suggestions:

1) if you are concerned about privacy you should also turn off malware
protection in FF because it sends pages that you visit to Google (yes, I know
their privacy policy - do you trust them?). For additional points you can open
_about:config_ , search for "google" and remove all occurences. Point being:
even FF doesn't completely protect your privacy by default.

2) DDG is great and I use it, but if I were really concerned about privacy I
would use a non-US provider (StartPage is based in Netherlands, not sure where
they host their servers though). Point being: DDG claims they don't store user
data, but that doesn't mean NSA doesn't either. If they are USA based, they
must obey USA laws.

------
codesuela
Sentiment in the comments indicates how I feel: FirefoX is now the New Browser
To use if you want privacy and security but wait there is more: the sole act
of installing it is a charitable donation towards the free internet. Firefox
problems aside ( _caugh_ no multiprocess execution model _caugh_ ) thats still
a strong sales pitich. And that is one of the few (hip?) trends WE get to
influence if not decide the choice wich Browser our close aquaintances use.
And that is awesome and and i encurage everyone to excersise it. Bretheren
lets turn the tide and make FF no 1 again by leading with a good example! As a
long time DDG user and recently reformed ex chrome user I say: Hutzzah

PS please pardon my autocorrect

------
andrasokros
I tried Chrome last week, but I still think the FF has a better UX, so I
switched back. My biggest problems was that, out of the box, Chrome's address
bar is just plain bad. It only shows 5 possible targets, while in FF I can go
through my whole history, and the most used page comes up first. I didn't
really noticed that I used it that much, until I tried Chrome.

This goes for the Android versions as well. If I click the address bar there
in Chrome, it will go to the edit mode, which I rarely use. In contrast FF
goes into edit mode + it shows relevant possibles from history underneath.

------
draven
_In Firefox, typing /downl[return] will open a link titled "download" on the
current page_

Using ' (Quick Find within link-text only) instead of / (Quick Find ) is even
faster/easier.

------
cenhyperion
I made the exact same two switches over the past week and agree with the
author. Honestly it's been great. I'm also slowly migrating away from my gmail
and to a hosted email on my domain.

------
_pmf_
I'd like to switch back to Firefox, but it's such an unbearably slow hog that
I cannot force myself doing it, and I'm not even using anything JS intensive.

------
ww520
I use Firefox mainly and Chrome/IE for testing sometimes. Firefox has been
pretty solid; however, one really annoying change in v22 is that it blows up
the default zoom level. That makes websites look very big. They said it's
honoring the DDP setting on Windows and for HiRes monitor, but it looks like a
bug or a misguided feature. I really hope they revert the change. I'm tired of
hitting ctrl-- to zoom out on every site.

~~~
iforapsy
An easy fix for the DPI change in Firefox 22 is to set
layout.css.devPixelsPerPx in about:config to 1.0.
[https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/questions/962945?page=2#an...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/questions/962945?page=2#answer-452951)

------
ashmud
As a long time Opera+FF user, I'm surprised I never came across the Custom Tab
Width add-on, or even bothered to look for such an add-on. Made my day. :)

~~~
eCa
Tab Mix Plus is another option, with plenty of settings for everything
concerning tabs:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tab-mix-
plus/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/)

------
1O0101ll100O
You can still use the Googlesharing addon to proxy your searches through a
concentrator.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
us/firefox/addon/googlesharing...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
us/firefox/addon/googlesharing/)

As long as you trust the proxy to not be an adversary.

Sometimes[often times] the default proxy will go down. I've had luck using the
following alternate:

googlesharing.riseup.net

------
ionwake
Why does anyone trust DuckDuckGo more than Google?

I am really confused

~~~
thrownaway2424
The only sensible comment in the entire thread! There is no reason whatsoever
to trust DDG more than Google. In fact you'd think it far more likely that DDG
is a stooge of the NSA than is Google.

I do personally find this thread quite amusing because it's so irrational.
Firefox + DDG is so slow for searching that you might as well erase 10 years
of browser performance improvements and downgrade your DSL line. Chrome
omnibar + prefetch + google instant makes for much faster searching vs.
firefox which lacks all of those things (and DDG which lacks "instant"). Also
I have to type the entire search into firefox's search bar because DDG doesn't
have suggestions. And let's not even talk about the gulf in quality between
DDG and Google.

------
Hilyin
My biggest problems with Firefox after using Chrome for so long is stability.
I find that web pages can lock up the entire browser rather than just a tab,
and this isn't just a rare occurrence, when I tried to give it a chance a week
ago, it happened several times. I am amazed they still haven't picked up the
separate process per tab feature yet.

~~~
Wilya
The separate process per tabs feature has different drawbacks. Notably, it
means Chrome uses more memory and can handle way less simultaneous open tabs
than Firefox.

I'm glad both approaches exist.

------
teeja
Over several years of comparing, I find DDG results are fine for reasonably
common questions and recent stuff. Sometimes when doing deep searches for more
arcane topics (especially farther back in history) Google will get to what I'm
looking for sooner. But I usually use Google Books for that stuff (which is
where they retain a -big- advantage).

------
anthemcg
"Chrome Inspector is nice and all, but Firebug is clearly superior. I no
longer recall why I hold this opinion. I'm looking forward to finding out."

For some reason, I also think this exact thing.I also know other people who
share this sentiment. I wonder if it comes from Firebug just being the first
to the scene?

~~~
cromwellian
In my experience, Chrome is way better than Firebug or Firefox's builtin tools
for development. Firefox's debugger doesn't appear to have any way to debug
webworkers for example. You can't reformat source. They only just got
SourceMap support and it doesn't appear to work as good. No syntax coloring.
Poor profiling tools, can't get a timeline which shows frames per second,
breakdown of paint/style recalc/layout/composite, no memory/heap profiling UI,
etc. No explorer for local storage or filesystem apis, no manager for app-
cache. Nothing like chrome://net-internals for analyzing network issues, and
on and on.

I'm sure they'll fix all that in time, they have a good development team, but
to say Firebug is clearly superior is obviously based on not having used the
Chrome tools to do anything significant.

------
rc4algorithm
Another particular nagging problem with Firefox is that "full screen doesn't
even hide the tabs or address bar (just the OS X bar, assuming you're using OS
X). It would be nice if you can add a way to change Firefox's settings so
that, in full screen, the only thing visible is the web page.

~~~
Skalman
On my Linux fullscreen (F11) shows nothing but web content.

------
carlob
I'm currently using DDG + Safari with Glims. I would love to switch to
Firefox, the only thing that's holding me back is the lack of a good
replacement to ClickToPlugin killers.

Those are little js that will remove the flash/silverlight video and replace
it with an mp4. This also effectively kills youtube ads.

------
tokyovapr
Blog post about why DuckDuckGo cannot provide any real privacy assurances when
it comes to the NSA... [http://etherrag.blogspot.jp/2013/07/duck-duck-go-
illusion-of...](http://etherrag.blogspot.jp/2013/07/duck-duck-go-illusion-of-
privacy.html)

------
kentwistle
Looks good! Omnibar instantly makes Firefox more familiar. I have decided to
switch back to Mozilla, they seem far more ethical than any competing browser
vendor. So I too am going to switch for a while. Firefox & DuckDuckGo.

------
prettyfly
Is there anyway to specify a time range on queries on DuckDuckGo? Such as
"last year", "any time", "last week" etc. Works on StartPage but would be nice
to have it on DDG too.

~~~
hunterjlang
check out
[http://help.dukgo.com/customer/portal/articles/215622](http://help.dukgo.com/customer/portal/articles/215622)

~~~
prettyfly
Thanks

------
dendory
I've never used Chrome, always been on Firefox so that part is really not a
big deal for me, but I did try DDG in the past and there always comes a point
where results aren't quite up to par.

------
dotmanish
fwiw, FireFox on MacOS shrinks the tabs to favicon before scrolling, without
using an add-on. The article screenshots indicate it spoke of Linux.

------
dewarrn1
Searching the current page for links in Firefox (using ') is a great feature
and one of the things I miss most when I have to use Chrome.

~~~
tbe
I wish there was a way to do this search only on the currently visible part of
the page. Installing a hit-a-hint type of addon would then be less of a
prerequisite for me to use the browser.

------
daturkel
Is there any substitute in firefox for Chrome's keyword searching? That's the
only chrome feature I really care about.

~~~
cpeterso
Firefox has built-in support for Keyword Search bookmarks. You don't need to
install an add-on to create aliases.

If you bookmark any website's search results page, you can add a keyword and
edit the bookmarked URL to include a printf-style %s placeholder. When you
enter the keyword plus some string, Firefox opens the bookmarked URL,
substituting your string for %s.

For example, I have a "w" keyword search for Wikipedia
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.php?search=%s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.php?search=%s)
and a "yt" keyword search for YouTube
[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&search=Searc...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&search=Search)

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daturkel
Awesome, that's exactly what I was looking for.

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steve918
I find it interesting that everyone suggests switching to Firefox and then
changing the default search engine since a good deal of Mozilla's income comes
from Google paying to be the default search engine.

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decryptthis_NSA
Less data-points for Google /NSA the better it is. Firefox managed quite fine
even without $300 million a year and the idea is not use Google for
everything, not to ensure that FF has billions in their bank account

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drunkenmasta
anyone else think that the bigger DuckDuckGo gets the more likely it will turn
into something similar to Google in terms of less privacy?

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barista
One question, Why?

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epmatsw
Firefox is comparable to Chrome in terms speed and features. However, Mozilla
doesn't have the same incentive to collect and use data on their customers
that is inherent to Google, an advertising company. In addition to that,
Firefox is fully open source, unlike Chrome which contains closed source
components from Google.

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area51org
... and, as I mention above, the Mac version has been pretty bad over the last
few months, enough to drive users away (including me).

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epmatsw
Really? I've been using Nightly exclusively on my laptop and haven't noticed
any problems. Maybe just lucky.

Edit: Oh, the mac version of Chrome. Gotcha.

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area51org
Yeah, I'm still on Chrome on various Windows VMs and PCs with no problem.

