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Comment by _Codemonkeyism | Hacker News Reader

I use FF, although Mozilla focuses on thousand of other things instead of making FF a great browser.

As a developer I'm annoyed every time I enter "com.scala.List" in the address bar and FF does not use google to search but thinks this is an url. No, "List" is not a TLD and no that website does not exist.

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As a developer I'm annoyed every time I enter "defined.in.hosts.file" in the address bar and Chrome does not believe this is a url but performs a search instead. Yes, I can define anything as a valid domain in hosts and yes that website exists on my computer.

That's weird. Any time I search for anything in chrome that doesn't contain a space, it asks me "Did you mean to go to http://x ?"

It does a DNS lookup and if it's a valid domain shows you this. If you see it for complete nonsense, then it's possible your ISP is doing DNS Hijacking like mine!

Eg. if I type "cheese", it shows "Did you mean to go to http://cheese/"? If I click that link I get TalkTalk's "Error Replacement Service" full of ads (or at least I did, till I switched to Google DNS because TalkTalk's "opt-out" system has been conveniently broken for years)!

Ah, that explains that. I always found that feature annoying, I didn't know it was because my ISP misbehaving. I always get a century link search page when I typo urls.

Yeah, that'll be it. There's some info on all the stuff it breaks here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_hijacking

The new Google "did you mean to go to ?" nonsense is something else to add to that link!

My ISP (TalkTalk) claims to have an opt-out page but the forums suggest it's been broken for years, and today it is a 404. I have an open issue with the CEOs office to opt me out manually but they've been pretty useless so far.

If you add a slash to the end, it'll always treat it as a domain. eg. "cheese/".

I did see someone from Google ask if it'd be useful if after the first time, when Google knows it's a valid domain, it should just go there directly (even without the slash). Everyone said yes, but it doesn't seem like it was ever implemented!

Enter it in the search bar instead? Not trying to be snarky - but that's why Firefox offers both, so you can be explicit about your intent.

Yeah, wondering the same. Is there an advantage to type it into the address bar? Maybe a faster key combination or something?

Address bar is Cmd+L on Mac. Search bar is Cmd+K on Mac. I _think_ on Windows/Linux it's the same thing but with Ctrl instead of Cmd...

> Mozilla focuses on thousand of other things instead of making FF a great browser.

Mozilla focuses on thousand of other things in addition to on making FF a great browser.

See project Quantum, WebExtensions (some would argue that it makes the browser worse, but the goal is undeniably to make it better), and Photon.

I feel exactly the other way about Chrome; whenever I need to type in a test site URL, it thinks it's a search query, and I need to go back and stick http:// in front.

FYI You can just add / at the end for the same effect

Try "g com.scala.List" instead. It's not that much inconvenience.

What other arcane commands do I need to use to make FF work like Chrome?

Why should Firefox work like Chrome? They're two separate products, and Firefox offers an explicit search bar for disambiguating searches from addresses. Especially important since 'List' could indeed be a TLD in the near future.

No reason to force X to work like Y.

The point of these commands (invented by Opera by the way) is to give you choice what search engine to use while not sacrificing your performance. Google's approach is different: remove choices that might confuse or distract you. Choose what you like.

Does the 'g' prefix do anything? On my Firefox it still searches for 'g com.scala.List' in Duck Duck Go, my default search engine. When I run that on Chrome it searches for 'com.scala.List' on Github because I've chosen g as a search leader for Github (which is super convinient and I wish I could do that on Firefox).

You definitely can do that on Firefox, in search preferences.

I just add a space at the end and it becomes a search. Other sibling comments have other workarounds, but that's been the easiest for me.

How could the browser know this is not a TLD without first doing a DNS lookup? And please don't mention Mozilla's Public Suffix List.

I agree. I dont know where Mozilla is spending their money, but they are years behind in regards to security enhancements in comparison with Chrome, Edge, and IE11. Around IE7 nivea. Still waiting for 64 bit Firefox with Sandbox and per-tab-process and CFI.

I hope they never go with process-per-tab in Firefox. It's one of the things I dislike about Chrome.

I thought that's what Electrolysis was. We've switched to an ESR release with e10s disabled because of an incompatible add-on listed as compatible. Annoying, because the idea is if an add-on doesn't work with e10s, e10s will be automatically disabled. And of course in this case it doesn't since the add-on works "great" with it!

I believe the main thing Electrolysis does is split the UI and rendering into separate processes. It also creates separate processes for some other tasks. But as far as I know it doesn't give each tab a separate process.

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