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.
I don't think I've ever used these modifiers but Firefox's address bar, Awesomebar, is indeed awesome. Compared to the utter garbage that is Chromium's Omnibar, I can find any page I've visited within a few key strokes. Chromium, on the other hand, almost immediately forgets and you have to go to the actual History to find it. Even Safari is miles ahead of Chromium in this regard. I'm still convinced that crippling Omnibar is Google's way of nudging users to search for the term again (and thus displaying ads within the search results) instead of just picking it up from history.
Haha! Hello, fellow longtime Firefox user. I also vividly remember this term in Firefox's marketing a long time ago, but the most recent results on Google are from circa 2010. Seems they've largely dropped it as a public-facing term :)
(-: Although…I've had the most success with guiding new users by calling it "the thing that looks like an air vent" or "a funny little group of three horizontal lines".
When I called it "the hamburger menu", I got confused stares. Maybe if the top line looked more like the top of a hamburger bun… although why a hamburger should mean "menu" is still a bit odd.
Totally agree. I basically don't use bookmarks at all because the super awesome FF fuzzy search in the bar just works with my mental model (i.e. I recall some letters/words of what I want, and it usually just appears there)
100%, I'm the same way. The Firefox address bar is truly a work of art. I used to worry that I was just crazy whenever I tried Chrome and found the experience so inferior, because how much variation could there be in fuzzy search? tons, apparently.
Using bookmarks males it even better though, as they appear above the other suggestions. I've been adding quite a lot of websites I visit to bookmarks just because of this. It's also awesome because I can search for the name of the bookmark, so for instance on ProtonMail where I have more than one account (yes I use the webmail, I'm sorry) I can just search for "personal mail" or "work mail" and I get the URL that sends me to the inbox _in the correct account_ which is pretty awesome.
> Even Safari is miles ahead of Chromium in this regard.
I hate Safari's address bar. One visit to a mistyped address can ruin your suggestions forever, that typoed URL will be always preferred over the correct one.
Firefox's address bar is indeed great. Always works flawlessly.
You can delete the offending URLs from Safari’s history and they won’t show up in the suggestions anymore. I only found that out while experimenting after years of frustration. In a perfect world, of course, such features would have a small UI affordance like a context menu entry for the address bar.
That woud be nice. Or respond to the Delete key. I tried pressing that, Option-Delete, Shift-Delete, and by then I'd spent more time than it would have taken to move the highlight onto the row I wanted. (>.<)
This was always the most baffeling thing to me -- how could google be so bad at search? But the answer, I suspect, is simple: they want you to make a new google search rather than jump straight to the site.
One reason why I prefer to use firefox at work. I can type some part of the title and it finds the Jira tickets/ confluence link easily from my history. Chrome would take me to search page and the search returns nothing since it cannot find anything from the locally hosted jira/confluence.
Also Chrome has a hard limit on the length of history that it'll store and I regularly want things that I saw more than 90 days ago. Firefox seems to be longer.
Absolutely. At the current computer I'm at, I last visited https://github.com/austinhuang0131/instagrabber in May 2020, and typing either "insta" or "austin" in the addressbar still shows that URL as a suggested address.
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...).
I remember the Opera ~9 URL bar did actually search the whole browser history (not just website url + title), which seemed pretty incredible at the time. Maybe it was a bit overkill though.
As we speak the Mozilla CEO, on reading this comment, is probably saying "see, they love our innovative addressbar; so we should focus innovation efforts entirely on that, make it entirely new, ... nothing stays the same ... we could make it vertical!" ...
It still has issues. It sucks when trying to find a previous page if there are 3 or more results for the same search term. Which happens when researching and clicking on multiple links.
If you have the focus in the address bar and press Tab, Firefox puts you into search mode (while retaining focus in the address bar) using your default search engine. Is there something missing?
I'm using Firefox right now. When I highlight in the bar and press tab, ONLY when the drop-down bar is showing, it moves the cursor down one to Amazon, which is not my default search engine, but the first one alphabetically.
So that doesn't work.
I also don't want to search my default search engine. I want tab to search for the panoply of websites that the omnibox will search. When I start typing ebay, I want "tab to search ebay".
I know I can set them up manually (a pain, but might be worth the investment to avoid the google overlord), however, I still don't get the "tab to search blah" function with a keyword. I have to type the keyword exactly -instead of having tab function as autocomplete- then space for my query.
> When I start typing ebay, I want "tab to search ebay".
You can configure Firefox to do this with a single checkbox. Go to Settings, click Privacy & Security on the side, go down to the Address Bar section, and make sure that "Search engines" is selected.
When I do that, I can click in the address bar (which brings up the drop-down), type "ebay", and then you'll see "Search with eBay" appear below in the drop-down, and then a single Tab puts it into eBay search mode.
I think that's just because the ebay search engine is installed by default? They want this to work for any site with a search engine they've ever visited - at least, that's how it works in Chrome, IIRC.
I also remember missing that feature dearly when I switched from Chrome to Firefox. However, some time in the intervening decade, they've actually added that to Firefox! I can type "<Ctrl-L>ebay<TAB>esp32<ENTER>" and I end up on the eBay search page for "esp32". Perhaps there is a setting or about:config option that needs to be toggled? Many of Firefox's best features are thusly hidden.
It used to be that search and address were two different fields in the browser UI. That helped - if typed in the address bar, you were probably looking for something in an address [so if you typed potato, it could search for a url in your local history with the word potato], and not for something in a web page.
Then Google realized you could combine the two; this makes it less likely you will use a competing search, gives you more places to show ads (as more things qualify as search) and most importantly - legitimizes tracking every page you open - as you did a web search for the URL!
Unfortunately, Chrome owns the web, and Mozilla copies everything they do. Especially when they are FF's main source of income.
IMO, the old system was more accurate and more private. The search bar is for web searches.
Firefox does have a setting to add the search bar back if that’s your jam, you can turn off address bar search suggestions in the settings too.
If you turn off address bar search suggestions then the address bar will still search anything you enter that’s not a url on your chosen default search engine though. You might be able to turn off that behaviour in about:config
Not only that but the shortcuts haven't changed as Ctrl + L puts you in the adress bar and Ctrl+K sets you up for a search with the default engine in the adress bar
Except when you run across sites like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web that intercept Ctrl-K for their own internal search tool. At least that one passes a second Ctrl-K on to the browser for focusing the search bar. I've seen others that don't, although I can't bring one to mind right now.
Yep you can. I have mine configured so that it will only search when I use one of the search prefixes. So to search on google I type "g example.com", and this is unambiguous with actually wanting to go to example.com.
This is what I do for work. Most of the pages I go to are not on the open internet. And I usually want to go to a wiki page I’ve been to before or to a book mark.
If I actually want to search i use the search box. But for me the url bar is for editing and finding urls.
> Then Google realized you could combine the two; this makes it less likely you will use a competing search, gives you more places to show ads (as more things qualify as search) and most importantly - legitimizes tracking every page you open - as you did a web search for the URL!
While Google may have the poor intentions you mentioned, don't most user prefer the omnibar vs separate bars? I personally like it quite a lot.
Page titles (#) and web addresses ($) don't seem to work for me, but then they sound like they should be modifiers to the other search modifiers.
It should probably be noted that ^headphones like they suggest doesn't actually work, over here it only works with ^ headphones, since the ^ doesn't get applied until I press space and then the start of the address bar changes to "History" with a 'x' close option.
i am stunned that folks didn't know about this since i've been using this shortcut hundreds of times a day for at least 20 years. i guess the moral of the story is that browser vendors really need to make it easier to discover the useful features that are buried in documentation
In Windows' File Explorer, F6 cycles focus between window sub-regions, while Alt+D sends you unconditionally to the address bar independent of where the focus is. So maybe there is a parallel here.
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.
Ctrl+F4, Ctrl+W close tab
Alt+F4 close window
Ctrl+(Shift+?)+Q close browser entirely
Ctrl+Shift+T undo close tab
Ctrl+Shift+N undo close window
Ctrl+N new window
Ctrl+Shift+P new private window
Ctrl+B toggle bookmarks bar
Ctrl+Shift+B open library (bookmarks window)
Ctrl+H open history in side pane
Ctrl+Shift+H open library (history window)
Ctrl+G, F3 find again
Ctrl+Shift+G, Shift+F3 find previous
Ctrl+Shift+V paste as plain text
Ctrl+Shift-Z redo
Alt+Entry in address bar opens address in new tab
Some browser-based editors will helpfully offer Vim bindings for editing, without exhaustively emulating all bindings. Of course, once in the flow of editing, I type Ctrl+W to delete a word, and voila, the tab closes!
I'd almost forgotten about Ctrl-L. I used to use it all the time on Celeron work computers with IE, because I could open the browser, type Ctrl-L and an address, and press Enter before the toolbar finished drawing. I wouldn't even see what I had typed appear before the page I requested started loading! Think I also used it with Windows Explorer, after the IE integration…
I dislike shortcuts with special characters, as its availability depends on the keyboard layout. It's quite common that the shortcut doesn't work when you have to use modifier keys to invoke it.
Some vendors make an effort to support non-US layouts, others not so much (e.g Adobe, and recently Microsoft).
As a shortcut junkie, I've even changed the OS keyboard layout to enable more shortcuts to work, and memorising the location of special characters by feel. But that's not exactly an intuitive UX.
As some examples of shortcut keys that usually brings me dread are: /, ~, [, ], ;, |
I much prefer shortcuts in the form of "ctrl + letter"
It would be nice if the author could fix this page, since the examples are incorrect and do not work as written. You need a space after the magic character.
Although I use it exactly as described (prefixing my search with the magic character followed by a space), it's not necessarily the best way to use it. If you can retrain your muscle memory, these shortcuts are better as suffixes. "% fish" will only show the open tabs (in the current container) with "fish" in them. "fish %" does the same, but when you've only typed the "fish" part, it will have the full set of search suggestions. Which are generally quite good in Firefox, and if what you're looking for is already in an open tab, it'll probably be in the list. But sometimes I don't remember if I have the tab open, so a history result would be better. With the suffix, you get the best of both worlds: the initial "fish" may show too many things, so tacking on "fish %" will restrict it to just the open tab results. That avoids doing it in two passes and having to go back and edit to remove the restriction token.
The actual feature is richer than you might think. It's only hinted at in https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet... but there's actually a little DSL for queries. You can build these things up into filters. "% fish # github" will search for open tabs with github in their title. So if you can too many results (with eg "% fish"), you can filter them down incrementally (by tacking on " # github"). Yes, this disagrees with the previous suggestion; I'm back to prefixes here.
Whoa, you're right! I know it used to be a problem, since I told several people about the feature, they tried it, it didn't work, and when looking at it I realized they were leaving off the space (or I hadn't even mentioned it).
Err... I attempted to update my comment. I guess it was too old but I still had the page open with an edit link present?
And now I notice that multiple other people are reporting that they still need the space. Something smells buggy....
> stop searching internet for local hostname I type into the bar
Yes, please.
I have a separate address bar and search bar in Firefox, and it still insists on searching DDG for local hosts names when I type them in the address bar. Stop doing this. (The solution for now is to type http://localname/ )
As long as your local names aren't changing all the time, an easy way is to create a keyword in your Firefox bookmarks, for each local host. That's specifically a keyword, not a tag. You can edit them in the Manage Bookmarks screen.
One nice feature of this is you can give a more complete URL for each keyword, for instance typing "nas" could link to "https://192.168.0.4:8181" with an IP and port number. It's instantly fast, and doesn't rely on a functioning DNS server.
The about:config dark magic you're looking for should be `browser.fixup.alternate.enabled = false`, `browser.fixup.dns_first_for_single_words = true` and `browser.fixup.domainsuffixwhitelist.<localdnsname> = true`.
Also: Show the full URI in the address bar. For some reason, firefox thinks it's cool to hide the protocol section when visiting http pages. Thankfully, it still shows https, an improvement over Chrome's mess of a UI.
Though imo the killer feature of FF address bar is simply that it's tied to a proper search history. Unlike chrome (which I sadly have to use at work), that only keep 90 days of history (!), making the address bar useless for anything but tabs, recent searches and as a link to a search engine. I really can't see an excuse for that behavior, the sqlite used by chrome is a few mb at worst.
This isn't average user friendly. No one except nerds will remember these symbols. Why not simply make it so that typing !history ____ will search history, !bookmarks ___ will search bookmarks and so on? This at least stands a chance of being used more widely.
This only works if you put the special character in the beginning and not at the end e.g. if I type "hacker news %" it still only filters by open tabs, but it doesn't show the "Tabs x" label (whether I add a space or not). Which is how I use it 99% of the time, since I only need to add special characters if it wasn't already finding what I meant without them.
(Not that I mind personally, since I'm already familiar with the feature)
That was my first thought. I will literally never use any of these simply because I can't remember all of them. !h __, !b __, or !a __ would be something I could possibly remember.
EDIT: To be clear I hate being a downer here. But I will never use these. Nobody I work with will ever use them either. This is for the 1% of the 1% and a few minor tweaks would make it actually useful with the default bindings.
You can also tweak the behavior via `about:config` to emphasize the types of results you care about. I like to set `browser.search.suggest.enabled` to `false` to keep it from showing search suggestions since I almost exclusively want to either type in my own search term or go back to a previous webpage I've visited.
The proper end user settings for this are currently in about:preferences#privacy (also linked to from about:preferences#search where most users would probably expect them). We have a myriad of about:config prefs affecting the address bar that are hard to keep track of and understand even for Firefox engineers (e.g. because the term "suggest" is overloaded), so I'd avoid recommending about:config to end users even among the Hacker News audience.
The UI doesn't let you turn off searching from the address bar. It does let you choose to have a separate search box, but that doesn't seem to alter the address bar's behaviour. And when you do disable search with about:config the prompt still reads "Search with Bing or enter address".
Thanks for the improved tip - I have found it hard to parse through all the address-bar-related about:config options in the past, the UI seems like a better way!
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.
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.
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.
The biggest annoyance for me with firefox is that there is no modifier to search across tabs in multiple containers. If I have 400 tabs open with temporary containers extension, it renders this search feature useless.
It doesn't matter if I have 50, 100 or 400, the search just doesn't work across containers. However it is extremely annoying if I have a lot of tabs, because tree style tab also has its limits(though much higher than with the normal UI) and once those are reached it would be far more efficient to search.
You can search across tabs using the tab search in the top right corner though (an arrow pointing down). There might be a shortcut for it but I'm not aware of any.
Although if you are really opening 400 tabs at once I'd recommend either tree-style tabs or rethinking your life choices lol.
Btw, the arrow icon cannot be moved from the tabs bar, annoying because I completely hide this bar, but sometimes it would be useful to have this menu.
I don't open 400 at once, they accumulate over time (I mostly open about 50-200 at once). And of course I am using tree style tabs, otherwise I would not be able to use more than 50 tabs efficiently (right now I have 71 opened, because I cleaned it up at the end of june). But that is not the point.
The arrow tab search does the exact same thing as using % modifier in the address bar. I still can't search pages that are in containers that are different from the currently opened site.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Uh. Yeah, that seems to track - my current history seems to back to about when I first set up Firefox Sync. If that's really the case, then... it's really lame. I don't recall it being communicated at all during Firefox account creation and activating sync, and it's exactly the kind of information I pay attention to.
In fact, the idea of enabling cloud sync being a destructive operation, silently truncating local data, is preposterous. I wouldn't have thought of it.
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.
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:
so I tried a url that works on my local network and is in my history, bookmarks etc. Every single one of those modifiers sent that hostname with the modifier to my default search engine.
Maybe it doesn't play nicely, or at all with privacy badger, ublock origin, ddg etc plugins installed?
For me, using it as it is described in the examples also does not work, instead I have to hit space after the modifier, then the address bar will go into the correct mode and the UI shows this as well.
It also works with pasting to the address bar, but the space between modifier and term seems to be required.
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.
That's really cool! But perhaps this should be made discoverable by e.g. showing the tokens or just a list of different search options somehow (right clicking the address bar, or a small button on it you can press, ...)
BTW something I really dislike about firefox is the switch to tab behavior when your bookmark/url happens to match an open tab: I guess it tries to be economical and bring you to a tab where you already have that page open. But that means switching context to another window or even virtual desktop for me. Also sometimes maybe I want to keep the other tab at its current state? I wish this behavior could be disabled, it has almost never been what I wanted.
I think you can use control-enter to open a new tab instead. But with Firefox open right now I searched for several open things and it didn't offer to switch tabs. I've usually only seen that when searching tabs with % though.
This is great, but I can't never remember these shortcuts, or others useful FF shortcuts, "?" should have been a shortcut to a help page listing this kind of things, or maybe there is already such page I'm not aware of.
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.
One thing I'm missing is able to copy the URL of many tabs.
As soon as you were able to select multiple tabs for making bookmarks I just assumed that you could ctrl+c and get the urls in plaintext. But doesn't seem to be that easy.
The no-addon workaround for this is to right click any tab, first select all tabs and then bookmark all tabs. Give the folder a name and open it in the bookmark manager. Now you can select them all and copy the URLs.
It's an awkward solution, but it does work and is relatively quick.
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?
I use the shortcuts and address bar extensively - they made me a quick bookmarker and more often I gauge what I have indexed on a topic prior to do a websearch. With "+" you can have more than one tag to narrow down a list if it has multiple tags. While just using history+fuzzysearch works for a lot of people, I'm browsing too much to have a small list when using the history on often used terms - thus bookmarks and tagging.
The '+' tag search never really works for me in a satisfying way. I'd expect to be shown results that match only the tag I ask for, but frustratingly I always get bookmarks mixed in that match in the title and URLs.
is this due to "bestmatch" suggestions being shown first? I turned off alot (and made the results rather long) to get more out of it. These are modified values from the defaults:
I just wish Firefox would stop trying to open external programs when I type "site:" in the address bar. It's so annoying to type "site:example.com hello" and just get a "No apps available" dialog and have to retype my search, manually specifying a search engine that time. I'm not sure if it's a bug with Snap, Firefox, or both, but it is beyond infuriating.
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).
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.
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).
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?!
What would make my hoard of bookmarks actually useful would be if this interface supported searching tags, folder names, or any kind of metadata for the bookmarks beyond the title and url.
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.
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.
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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=firefox%20address%20bar