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Comment by kristiandupont | Hacker News Reader

To everybody asking what Firefox has that Chrome lacks: The Awesomebar.

I haven't seen it mentioned here but it's by far the thing I miss the most from FF (along with FireBug and TreeStyle Tabs). It practically replaces bookmarks for me because because it searches through the history. In Chrome it feels like I have to re-google everything unless I remember the exact url.

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Personally, I like Chrome's address bar better than Firefox 4's. In Chrome, I can type g-m-<enter> to go to Gmail. In Firefox, it's g-m-<down>-<enter>. It's a little thing, but it makes a difference to me.

Can't live without Tree Style Tabs though. Firefox is my "heavy lifting" browser.

I greatly prefer being able to hit enter on the first result too. Here is the addon I use to enable that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mozilla-labs-...

You don't need an addon -- the option is in about:config.

Specifically, browser.urlbar.autoFill. (Found that out just now.)

You can use tab instead of the down arrow - pretty much identical to tab completion in the linux command line.

You can change FF's behavior to match Chrome: setting browser.urlbar.autoFill to true in about:config will enable inline autocomplete in the awesomebar, instead of having to arrow down or tab down.

The solution I use is bookmarking sites and aliasing keywords to the bookmark - right click on a bookmark, go to properties, and add a keyword. For example, I have "hn" as the keyword for the Hacker News homepage, so if I type "hn" and hit enter, it expands to the full URL and goes to the page.

> In Chrome, I can type g-m-<enter> to go to Gmail. In Firefox, it's g-m-<down>-<enter>. It's a little thing, but it makes a difference to me.

This is really easy to do in Firefox with keyword bookmarks[0]. In fact, this is one of the things I hate about Chrome - keyword bookmarks are a total hack (you have to create a search engine without the %s, for string substitution).

0: http://lifehacker.com/#!196779/hack-attack-firefox-and-the-a...

Yeah. In chrome I can type just the domain (without the www. part). But FF (even with the urlbar.autofill property set requires me to type with www.

And in chrome I can do ctrl+shift+pageup/pagedown to move the tabs around. FF doesn't allow that.

Minor irritant, but thats what makes me like chrome.

This is a good point that I've only noticed recently. Address bar completion in Chrome is much much worse than in Firefox.

Yeah, I really miss Firefox URL keyword search. Too bad it becomes very slow as your history grows (at least in the older versions of FF).

That's definitely an issue, but there's a workaround if you want to do it. You need to VACUUM the sqlite database like this: http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2009/08/vacuum-firefox-databases-...

Firefox actually vacuums occasionally now (I think ~1/month for the places database)

Running 3.latest forever, I keep 4 months and it's as snappy as anything for what I use it for. I can get to the top 5 of my visited sites ordered by number of visits for each letter of the alphabet in one or two characters. While the history sidebar is exceedingly slow in doing searches, the address bar MRU is what they have nailed.

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