The killer feature is that you can extend this with your own macros. E.g. if you want the address bar to recognize "hn " as a prefix keyword, and redirect "hn firefox address bar" to, say, Algolia — you simply create a bookmark with "Keyword": "hn" and "URL": "https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%s" (not actually a URL, don't click on it) – %s indicating where the macro parameter substitutes. Then "hn firefox address bar" macroexpands to
The same is available in Chrome. I made a list of shortcuts I use here [0] -- copying a few favorites below:
shortcut: "aw", lets you type: "aw s3", "aw iam", etc.
https://console.aws.amazon.com/%s
shortcut: "amzn", searches the retail side
https://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=%s
shortcut: "gm", searches through gmail (change the 0 if you use multiple accounts)
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/%s
shortcut: "maps", searches google maps
https://www.google.com/maps/search/%s/
shortcut: "img", searches google images
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=%s
shortcut: "wp", goes directly to the article if it exists
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s
shortcut: "yt", searches youtube
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s
And IIRC, Chrome copied this from Opera. It's a shame Opera never found its audience (or more specifically, a revenue stream), they pioneered a lot of browser features that we consider to be standard these days, like tabs and support for extensions.
It's been around in some form in most major browsers for decades. I remember Creating custom search entries in Firefox (or was it Phoenix still at that point?) in the early 2000's.
My company intranet has a shortcut/URN website that we all configure as "go", so "go home", "go paystubs", etc. Anyone can create URNs. No more stale bookmarks when the HR system keeps changing. Very useful!
Chrome broke this recently, for shortcuts that have no substitution.
The ominibox history takes over.
For example, I used to be able to just type, "yt" and go to youtube, but now Ominbox history replaces it with my most recent history item that has "yt" in it
You can also use a duckduckgo query like ! site:site.com query. That is more reliable when using something like wikipedia when you aren't sure of the exact title and don't have to type it all out.
To this day I cannot fathom anyone willingly switching from Firefox to Chrome/Edge/any other Chromium-based browser. There are so many tiny features that are useful at least to myself, while a minor JavaScript performance advantage isn't something that important in the grand scale of things.
Firefox is increasingly unfriendly to power users. Wouldn't surprise me if they got rid of this feature someday because they have statistics showing few people use it.
I see this so much so, it's to the point that If I see you're using something else, I assume you're not a developer, and you're likely not a power user.
Everyone is there for a different minority used feature. By caring only about the feature used by the majority, you are actually satisfying no one.
That’s why product managers use persona on top of metrics. Nice products have niche features and some kind of personality. You don’t want to overfocus on them but stripping them all is a losing move.
WordPerfect and Quattro Pro (now WordPerfect Suite, I think) seem to persist due catering to special needs of law firms. Catering to some niche users can keep you afloat despite an otherwise market-dominant competitor.
Firefox would have no users at all if Mozilla abandon us nerds and power users who all rely a slightly different set of Firefox's obscure features. If Mozilla were smart, they would embrace us instead of wishing we were more like normal users (if we were, we'd be using chrome already!)
If you only focus on the most popular features you eventually narrow your product to one feature, so obviously there is a balance in there somewhere between focus and utility as well. Identifying why people use your product is as important as knowing what they use. Chrome does all the things I actually use from Firefox, but I use Firefox because when I ever need slightly more hackability it is there for me. That is at best, a once a year occurance.
"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.
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
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.
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.
(function () { let sel = window.getSelection(); let Qr; if (sel && sel.toString().length > 0) {Qr=sel.toString()} else {Qr=prompt('Search Site for','');} let hna=window.location.hostname; if(Qr) { location.href='http://www.google.com/search?&q=site:'+encodeURIComponent(hna)+'+'+escape(Qr) }})();
You can attach to a keyboard shortcut with a launcher or applescript.
Another great thing that only seem to exist for Firefox is Tree Style Tab [1] and a bunch of plugins around it. It completely changes the way I browse.
There is an honest but much, much more limited attempt top bring a something similar to Chromium: [2].
Is there a good way to hide the top tabs without getting into barely supported config files?
I like TST, but I gave up on it because I could never get the top tabs hidden correctly, and all the information I could find on the internet was different levels of out of date.
I see a sibling comment posted a link to some tab bar hiding CSS, but having gone though the same "different levels of out of date" problem myself I'll add my own solution that I'm currently using in Firefox 114 on Windows 11. Not perfectly space efficient, but avoids some issues with totally hiding the window titlebar, since I still wanted to keep the minimize/maximize/close controls up there.
Some of this may be platform specific to Windows (can't speak to window management buttons on other platforms), but hopefully it helps if anyone in this thread needs it or lands here later from search results:
/* Hide the tabs within TabsToolbar*/
.toolbar-items {
display: none;
}
/* Make the min/max/close buttons align to the right*/
#TabsToolbar {
display: flex;
flex-direction: row-reverse;
}
/* Hide the titlebar spacers, which push the buttons away from the corner */
.titlebar-spacer {
display: none;
}
/* Hide the sidebar header */
#sidebar-header {
display: none;
}
Stupid that this sort of fiddling is required when other browsers (like Edge and Brave) are doing native sidebar tabs, but I do like how compact Firefox's can be, plus being a tree instead of a flat list.
Enabling userChrome.css files and finding where to put it is left as an exercise to the reader.
IIRC there's also a config flag you need to set, otherwise it won't load the userchrome file. I forget the details, it's been a while since I set this up.
Not really, Chrome-based browsers have search keywords too.
What I would like most on the Chrome-based browser I have to use at work is history (^ keywords) and bookmark searching (# tag keywords, or * bookmark keywords) using "awesomebar" operators that Firefox has.
I'd really really like it if a form of search keywords could be used for forms that don't work as GET requests.
Funny enough, I just posted on Mastodon looking for recommendations of other browsers to try.
While I love the flexibility and openness that Firefox brings, there is a resource issue for me on my macbook pro. I have to spend a lot of time in Google Meets for work, and video conferencing via Firefox seems to redline the computer... It sounds like a jet engine and I wind up thermal throttling to the point that my machine becomes completely unresponsive.
I'd love to stay with Firefox - especially for the cross-device tab sharing and search - but the need for something stable is superseding my want to use a non-Google browser.
I have no doubt that Google is hamstringing performance on Firefox. But that is far outside of my sphere of control so I am focusing on the things I can effect.
Another member recommended disabling hardware acceleration so that is the first thing I'll try. If you have any other recommendations on how I can reduce the impact of the issue I'd love to hear them.
I use vivaldi because of the tab stack feature and until firefox gets support for something close to it I just can't switch. I tried to browse the web without it but I always come back to vivaldi. I have a tab hoarding problem and it's the only browser that actually makes helps me manage it.
I use Firefox mainly because of TreeStyleTab which lets me have 1k-2k tabs with no problem. Beats all other vertical tab options I've seen so far in other browsers
Custom bookmark / search engine functionality is easy to replicate on Linux with a few shell scripts, though.
I use Brave and yet use some complex search engines such as making POST requests to APIs based on the search input and telling the browser to open a URL provided in the API's HTTP response.
Consider just how many layers of JavaShit webdevs want to slap down on their websites these days, that "minor" performance difference adds up. Death by a thousand cuts, basically.
And then there’s tree style tabs. But actually I moved to Chrome due to how many issues I ran into with tree style tabs due to firefox not letting do its thing
I second this. I've had the very rare message saying the tab tree has gotten out of sync (always as a consequence of me moving tabs between incognito windows), but the first time it happened clicking the message refreshed the tab tree successfully; the second time it didn't but toggling the sidebar off and on fixed it. I've had no problems with stability.
And to me the context menu option to unload tabs is a killer feature.
It became slow and the only reason that was keeping me in Firefox (TST) started getting more and more broken so I switched. I used to be so vocal about TST back in the days that I’m probably the reason you use it btw.
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.
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
Now that’s awesome. Bookmarklets have felt largely useless to me since I got rid of the bookmarks bar outside of new tabs. This might make them useful again.
Or just right-click the input field, and if the browser recognizes it as a search field (they're good at it by default, but you can implement https://github.com/dewitt/opensearch to make extra sure), you'll get an option to create a search from it, with a keyword of your choosing (haven't tried Safari).
At least at some point in the past, this method had the advantage of working also with POST searches, while the manual insertion of %s works only with GET.
There is Duckduckgo Bangs - https://duckduckgo.com/bangs. They directly searches inside a website.
There are a total of 13,563 bangs of websites. Twitter, Amazon, Stackoverflow, wikipedia, arch linux. You have to set your search engine to DDG though.
Wanna check if Thunderbird v115 is in arch repos?
Ctrl + L, !archpkg thunderbird
Boom!
My favourites:
!w <term> searches <term> inside Wikipedia
!so <term> searches for that term inside stackoverflow
!a <term> searches inside amazon.com
!ai <term> searches inside amazon.in
!arch <term> searches inside arch wiki article for that term
!archpkg <term> directly searches for archlinux.org/packages
Also, I just learned that there is a "!hackernews"
It's nice that kagi lets you define your own, so I can have custom ones across browsers / mobile / desktop... So long as I'm logged in and have configured kagi to be my default search engine (my phone defaults to ddg and sometimes I might use a browser in a VM or something).
I've wrote the same, with the same algolia example :D
Do you remember if it was possible to edit or add custom search engines from GUI before? I remember having them, but I can't find it. Also it seems to me as a basic feature and not a "killer feature".
There used to be a GUI for that. Then they removed it. The functionality is still sorta, kinda available, in varying and increasingly undiscoverable ways.
Last time I checked, you had to navigate to a search engine (and/or make a search with it?) and hope its author published some magic special microformat metadata that identifies it as a search engine - then Firefox would helpfully offer you an option to add it as a search engine, somewhere in the address bar. I don't remember if it had any indicator visible by default, or if you had to right-click the address bar first.
And now I learned they "improved" this once again - hiding the feature under a right-click on a search box.
It really seems like browser vendors want to soft-kill this options. I'm just not sure why, especially when it comes to Firefox.
There's a firefox plugin [1] that lets you add custom search engines; they will be visible in the settings menu under "Search Shortcuts" where you can set the keyword to trigger the custom search.
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.
Often times during a Teams meeting someone would wonder who had filed this ticket and I would "Control-L p Jose Smith" to instantly bring up the org chart for Jose Smith. People were amazed.
The Control-L/Command-L(mac) to focus the url bar. p is the keyword set to search the internal company org chart.
Another useful Firefox feature is to right click, Take Screenshot, and save the full web page rendered as you see it as an image. This is useful for those internal webpages with tables and fancy javascript rendered widgets that never properly render to pdf when saving the page.
With these search keywords, I've cut down on my general purpose search engine use dramatically, maybe 90%. Most of my searches through ddg/google used to be searches I intended to land on a known website with, so with search keywords for the search functionality on wikipedia, documentation websites, etc, I have been able to cut out the middleman.
Also, people slag on wikipedia's search functionality a lot, but I've found it to actually be pretty good even with imprecise searches. For instance, I forgot the name of Lubyanka, but searching for "KGB prison" found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=kgb%20prison
I use this often. I just wish there was a way to escape the keyword. Like for example if I wanted to do a web search for "hn firefox address bar" I have to click the correct search engine with my mouse. Maybe there's a method I'm not aware of.
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!
This is a very old feature that (IIRC) all browsers copied that dates back to at least Microsoft Internet Explorer. I also recall people marketed it as a gimmick and came up with some silly names for it, e.g., "shortcuts". (I will try to find the originating browser and date it was introduced unless someone here beats me to it.)
Even today, Chrome presumptuously calls this macro expansion "site search".
I use it to access static pages. For example, I have local httpd's serving local pages on localhost addresses. One is a "clipboard" that I use in Chromebook "Guest" mode to output text from Chrome to a file descriptor, e.g., stdout or a file under /usr/local. This enables me to use UNIX utilities to process text from Chrome. (Chromebooks attempt to limit Chrome user access to the filesystem to a folder that the user can only access by using Chrome.)
For example, given the macro "https://127.0.0.8/%s.html", when I type "clip" in the address bar, the browser navigates to a local page
https://127.0.0.8/clip.html
This page is an HTML form with a textarea where I can paste text that I want to output to a file descriptor, e.g., stdout or a file under /usr/local.
Another example is a static page that is a list of web search results from various search engines. These results pages are generated by a command line web search system I created using only standard UNIX utilities.
A final example is that I use "site search" to quickly navigate to chrome://settings pages with a single key, e.g., chrome://settings/clearBrowserData, chrome://settings/siteData, chrome://settings/content/all, or chrome://settings/searchEngines.
1. I find this label comical as I'm not a "developer". I'm just a computer user trying to work around problems caused by ad-supported "tech" companies in the comparitively rare instances I have to use one of their hopelessly complex graphical web browsers.
I have been using duckduckgo's bang feature for searching a particular site. e.g. !hn to search on here, !w on wiki and !g back to google is the result from ddg looks off.
It was such a huge loss for me that for at least a year I used the outdated pre-Fenix. Now they still work on Desktop but they just stopped working on Android (althouth the bookmarks itself are synced-up)
The Tweet says it's still there, just slightly more buried than it used to be. Which is a shame since it's one of the most useful features in Chrome and not a lot of people know about it.
Still way less confusing than Firefox's UI for this though. What I like most about Chrome's implementation is how by default the search engine is linked to the main site, so I can type "yo<enter>" to visit the YouTube homepage or "yo<tab>" to search YouTube. And there's no need to manually set anything up (except to click the "activate" button now next to each site you want to the feature on, unfortunately).
If you mean from clicking on the star in the address bar, that is correct.
However, if you edit the bookmark afterwards from the bookmarks sidebar, or add a bookmark on the "Manage bookmarks" tab (CTRL+SHIFT+O), you do see it.
It's kind of weird that these turn into bookmarks and are mixed in with your bookmarks.
I think what people are talking about in this thread are "Search Shortcuts". And I don't know why this is a "best kept secret"; it's right in the Search section of your FF settings.
If you want to create one "one the fly", don't create a bookmark, but instead right-click in a search field and choose "Add a keyword for this search..." You can try it using the search at the bottom of this page.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=firefox%20address%20bar