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Comment by darkstar999 | Hacker News Reader

I've switched over to Firefox on all devices. It's especially useful on Android because I can use uBlock and other useful extensions, where Chrome doesn't have any.

The only feature I hope for is "hit tab to search" after typing a domain name in the search bar. For example in Chrome I can type "youtube.com" and then hit tab, and then type in a search query.

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I know it's not the same, but if you bookmark "https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s" and put in a keyword like "yt". You can type "yt whatever" in the addressbar and it will do a search on youtube.

You can also use https://www.reddit.com/r/%S with a capital `%S` to avoid escaping the slashes, so you can type "r all/top" or with GitHub "g Zren/reponame"

This is exactly what I needed. I set up this exact shortcut years ago, in Chrome, and have been slightly annoyed for months that "r sub/top" didn't work on Firefox. Thank you stranger.

And if you set DuckDuckGo or Qwant or a different search engine that supports !bangs as your default search engine, you can use those in your address bar - so no need to configure !yt, !w, !s etc manually.

https://www.givero.com has the full range of DDG bangs - and shares its revenue with good causes.

If you use DDG as your default search engine you can use bangs to get something kind of similar, typing "!yt search query" for example

> uBlock and other useful extensions, where Chrome doesn't have any.

The most underrated and undermarketed to the average user Firefox feature.

I too have switched on both mobile (Android) and PC. The only thing I would really need now is that the sync is automatic and I don't have to manually trigger it. The main benefit would be to browse something on your phone then be able to access it on your desktop via Library > Synced Tabs - no need to send it or sync it manually (which require additional steps/taps).

I just wish FF Focus would let you sync your browsing history :(

But Focus doesn't store your browsing history.

Yeah I know, I'm just expressing my desire that it would.

It's nice, clean, simple and nowhere near as "bloaty" (for lack of a better word) as normal FF on android. I use it as my default browser on my phone, but (for some reason[1]) every now and again it dumps articles I leave open and then I am no longer able to find and read them :/

[1] I have a feeling it happens after every update.

I'm on iOS using firefox and I had no idea you can install extensions on the Android version of firefox, that's very cool!

I agree. I would absolutely love tab to search in Firefox. The bookmark keyword is inferior

By far the biggest annoyance with firefox on mobile is that when you open the browser, are presented with all your tabs, and a toolbar which only searches your open tabs rather than just being a toolbar that you can type in a website, or a search term, or also search amongst your open tabs.

that's not how my firefox on android behaves, I can search just fine from the new tab page

Might be an iOS thing then

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