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
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.
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).
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"
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".
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
[+] [-] perihelions|2 years ago|reply
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=firefox%20address%20bar
[+] [-] gregsadetsky|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atomlib|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] velut|2 years ago|reply
I use the URL "https://www.google.com/search?q=site:ycombinator.com+%s" to search content from HN, and "https://www.google.com/search?q=site:reddit.com+%s" to search on Reddit. I also have "https://www.npmjs.com/package/%s" to directly go to a package page on npm.
[+] [-] bmacho|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjot|2 years ago|reply
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95426
[+] [-] johnnyworker|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unsungNovelty|2 years ago|reply
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"
[+] [-] asadotzler|2 years ago|reply
https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html
[+] [-] bmacho|2 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] jimmaswell|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viewtransform|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mcpackieh|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] behnamoh|2 years ago|reply
https://itsbehnam.com/Brave-Hacks-I-Create-my-Own-Custom-Sea...
[+] [-] rascul|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|2 years ago|reply
Even today, Chrome presumptuously calls this macro expansion "site search".
I use it to access static pages. For example, I have local httpd's serving local pages on localhost addresses. One is a "clipboard" that I use in Chromebook "Guest" mode to output text from Chrome to a file descriptor, e.g., stdout or a file under /usr/local. This enables me to use UNIX utilities to process text from Chrome. (Chromebooks attempt to limit Chrome user access to the filesystem to a folder that the user can only access by using Chrome.)
For example, given the macro "https://127.0.0.8/%s.html", when I type "clip" in the address bar, the browser navigates to a local page
This page is an HTML form with a textarea where I can paste text that I want to output to a file descriptor, e.g., stdout or a file under /usr/local.Another example is a static page that is a list of web search results from various search engines. These results pages are generated by a command line web search system I created using only standard UNIX utilities.
A final example is that I use "site search" to quickly navigate to chrome://settings pages with a single key, e.g., chrome://settings/clearBrowserData, chrome://settings/siteData, chrome://settings/content/all, or chrome://settings/searchEngines.
1. I find this label comical as I'm not a "developer". I'm just a computer user trying to work around problems caused by ad-supported "tech" companies in the comparitively rare instances I have to use one of their hopelessly complex graphical web browsers.
[+] [-] yasenn|2 years ago|reply
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=firefox%20address%20bar
[+] [-] a_c|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Max_Mustermann|2 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] doe88|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dugmartin|2 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/googlechrome/status/1504858912692084745
[+] [-] conaclos|2 years ago|reply
It is unfortunate that add-ons cannot add a set of keywords: it would be great to have all DuckDuckGo bangs defined as keywords by an add-on.
[+] [-] girishso|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conor-|2 years ago|reply
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
[+] [-] kevincox|2 years ago|reply
It is also great for keyword-based bookmarklets.
[+] [-] ris58h|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yannyu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ugh123|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bombolo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TRiG_Ireland|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FalconSensei|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frankjr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sam_goody|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] NikkiA|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tonylemesmer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sfink|2 years ago|reply
Although I use it exactly as described (prefixing my search with the magic character followed by a space), it's not necessarily the best way to use it. If you can retrain your muscle memory, these shortcuts are better as suffixes. "% fish" will only show the open tabs (in the current container) with "fish" in them. "fish %" does the same, but when you've only typed the "fish" part, it will have the full set of search suggestions. Which are generally quite good in Firefox, and if what you're looking for is already in an open tab, it'll probably be in the list. But sometimes I don't remember if I have the tab open, so a history result would be better. With the suffix, you get the best of both worlds: the initial "fish" may show too many things, so tacking on "fish %" will restrict it to just the open tab results. That avoids doing it in two passes and having to go back and edit to remove the restriction token.
The actual feature is richer than you might think. It's only hinted at in https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet... but there's actually a little DSL for queries. You can build these things up into filters. "% fish # github" will search for open tabs with github in their title. So if you can too many results (with eg "% fish"), you can filter them down incrementally (by tacking on " # github"). Yes, this disagrees with the previous suggestion; I'm back to prefixes here.
See https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/urlbar/nonte... for gory details of the address bar's operation in general, though it doesn't go into detail about the restriction tokens.
[+] [-] adql|2 years ago|reply
* correct ttps:// to https://
* stop searching internet for local hostname I type into the bar
[+] [-] m3at|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Santosh83|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freditup|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiffanyh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wincy|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nullgeo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lousken|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bugmen0t|2 years ago|reply
The canonical URL for how the address bar short cuts is https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet...
[+] [-] timvisee|2 years ago|reply
Some time back I wrote on it as well, along with some extra goodies: https://timvisee.com/blog/firefox-tricks-quantumbar/
[+] [-] javajosh|2 years ago|reply
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet...
[+] [-] TheArcane|2 years ago|reply
[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1479858
[+] [-] shadytrees|2 years ago|reply
https://eieio.games/nonsense/implementing-wordle-in-the-fire...
I hope it brings you the five minutes of delight that it brought me