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Comment by _opc6 | Hacker News Reader

I would switch today if Mozilla added tab completed search in the address bar that Chrome pioneered. It's very intuitive and difficult to give up.

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Not everyone is understanding what you're saying, as evident by the downvotes you're getting

I'm fulltime FF but I won't pretend that the in-site (site specific) search works as smoothly as it did (does?) in Chrome

In Chrome you would go to foo.com and you would use their search input and from then on, in your address bar you can type foo (or maybe just f, depending on how often you use foo.com), and press <tab> to search within the site

This is a workflow you get used to

For the longest time I wanted this in FF, but I think the real thing that clicked for me was just heavily leaning on duckduckgo's bangs

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

(Firefox does have in-site search, which you can use by right clicking in the site's search input and clicking "Add a Keyword for this Search", but I'm not even sure how it works heh)

edit: okay so this is how it works https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address... and I just added `a` for amazon.com and I typed `a` in the address bar and pressed <enter> and it didn't do anything, hm

edit2: so I guess my main point should have been: Firefox has a manual step for what Chrome did for "free", after you made your first in-site search, which you were probably already going to do

Not everyone is understanding what you're saying, as evident by the downvotes you're getting

Well also I'd like the address bar to be a fucking address bar and not an address-but-sometimes-search bar.

Hm, yeah, probably can't help you there

Minimally you can restore the search bar, and now `ctr-k` will focus that bar, while `ctrl-l` will continue focusing the address bar

HOWEVER.. if you type keywords and not a domain in the address bar, it's still gonna search. That's the rub you don't like, I suppose

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-search-bar-firefox-...

Here are a few firefox settings to make your URL field behave only as a URL field:

  user_pref("keyword.enabled", false);
  user_pref("browser.fixup.alternate.enabled", false);
  user_pref("browser.urlbar.suggest.searches", false);
  user_pref("browser.urlbar.filter.javascript", true);

You can put these in a "user.js" file in your profile directory if you don't have one already, or just set them in about:config

FWIW, I believe most if not all of these settings are also available under preferences | search.

Thank you for perfectly illustrating why Firefox will not find the mainstream acceptance of other browsers.

Almost nobody will enable this, though.

It's not like Chrome has an easy and user-friendly way to do the same thing. Quite the opposite: Chrome has no way at all to do this, while Firefox has a technical way to do it even if it's not obvious to most users that it's possible.

How does the tab-to-search feature in Chrome negatively affect how you use the address bar? Are you entering URLs with tabs in them?

It doesn’t negatively effect it. I like it

I was highlighting what I missed when switching over

I'm pretty sure that Opera and Firefox had that search feature before Chrome was even released ?

I hope I don't sound crass, but how much is this feature going to matter to you once Google locks up the web?

Hysteria of HN is hilarious.

What is your argument? It is clearly happening and it is not surprising given Google's business incentives. It's slow enough that there is a large chance of many falling for it, which is what makes it so dangerous.

You have tab completion in the search bar (Ctrl+K)!

Personally I disable the cloud-based suggestions and rely only on my local history.

I'm not sure if this accomplishes what you're looking for, but when I switched to Firefox I had similar complaints and turned to custom keywords:

https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html

Basically, Firefox allows you to set a keyword (which I often set to an abbreviation + question mark) which you can link to a site's search URL. For example to search Google Scholar I would type my keyword, "sch?" and then my search query, and after pressing enter I am taken to the site's search results. It's a few more steps you have to take, but has the added benefit of allowing you to add the functionality for any site.

Alternately you can switch the default search engine to DuckDuckGo, which lets you use DDG's "bang" search shortcuts (see https://duckduckgo.com/bang) from the Awesomebar. So you just type a search query and then append "!g" to run that search query through Google, "!w" to search for it on Wikipedia, "!yt" to search for it on HN, etc.

You're good to go! Just enable it in settings!

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