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Comment by frankjr | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> Awesomebar

Haha! Hello, fellow longtime Firefox user. I also vividly remember this term in Firefox's marketing a long time ago, but the most recent results on Google are from circa 2010. Seems they've largely dropped it as a public-facing term :)

Heh, this was a fun fact to learn. Had no idea they stopped using it. Thanks for sharing!

It will always be the awesomebar to me. And I'll never stop calling the hamburger menu, The Hamburger Menu.

(-: Although…I've had the most success with guiding new users by calling it "the thing that looks like an air vent" or "a funny little group of three horizontal lines".

When I called it "the hamburger menu", I got confused stares. Maybe if the top line looked more like the top of a hamburger bun… although why a hamburger should mean "menu" is still a bit odd.

I do find my self saying the 3 lined button in the upper left/right corner. But sometimes in professional settings I let hamburger slip out.

I'm afraid to ask what it's called now...

Totally agree. I basically don't use bookmarks at all because the super awesome FF fuzzy search in the bar just works with my mental model (i.e. I recall some letters/words of what I want, and it usually just appears there)

Using bookmarks males it even better though, as they appear above the other suggestions. I've been adding quite a lot of websites I visit to bookmarks just because of this. It's also awesome because I can search for the name of the bookmark, so for instance on ProtonMail where I have more than one account (yes I use the webmail, I'm sorry) I can just search for "personal mail" or "work mail" and I get the URL that sends me to the inbox _in the correct account_ which is pretty awesome.

100%, I'm the same way. The Firefox address bar is truly a work of art. I used to worry that I was just crazy whenever I tried Chrome and found the experience so inferior, because how much variation could there be in fuzzy search? tons, apparently.

> Even Safari is miles ahead of Chromium in this regard.

I hate Safari's address bar. One visit to a mistyped address can ruin your suggestions forever, that typoed URL will be always preferred over the correct one.

Firefox's address bar is indeed great. Always works flawlessly.

This was my biggest gripe when I used a MacBook 6 years ago. You’re telling me this issue still persists in current versions of Safari? Ridiculous.

You can delete the offending URLs from Safari’s history and they won’t show up in the suggestions anymore. I only found that out while experimenting after years of frustration. In a perfect world, of course, such features would have a small UI affordance like a context menu entry for the address bar.

That woud be nice. Or respond to the Delete key. I tried pressing that, Option-Delete, Shift-Delete, and by then I'd spent more time than it would have taken to move the highlight onto the row I wanted. (>.<)

This was always the most baffeling thing to me -- how could google be so bad at search? But the answer, I suspect, is simple: they want you to make a new google search rather than jump straight to the site.

How can we get people to do more searches?

Answer: don’t show anymore than three history suggestion items and provide no way to increase it

One reason why I prefer to use firefox at work. I can type some part of the title and it finds the Jira tickets/ confluence link easily from my history. Chrome would take me to search page and the search returns nothing since it cannot find anything from the locally hosted jira/confluence.

Also Chrome has a hard limit on the length of history that it'll store and I regularly want things that I saw more than 90 days ago. Firefox seems to be longer.

> Firefox seems to be longer.

Absolutely. At the current computer I'm at, I last visited https://github.com/austinhuang0131/instagrabber in May 2020, and typing either "insta" or "austin" in the addressbar still shows that URL as a suggested address.

Though for the full value I personally really also need some sort of interface that can show individual page visits in order to answer the question "What other pages did I visit at that point in time?" (sometimes I don't remember the right keywords to find a certain page again, but only some other page I visited during the same browsing session). The built-in history view is only of limited value here, because it always only shows the most-recent visit, so as soon as you visit a page again, it moves to the front of the list again and loses its original place and history context.

As usual, there used to be an add-on for that, which was subsequently broken by the move to webextensions (and even if somebody wanted to rewrite it, the webextension API doesn't cater for its full functionality). Thankfully some kind soul has maintained a version hacked to still work even on a current Firefox (https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/tree/master...).

I remember the Opera ~9 URL bar did actually search the whole browser history (not just website url + title), which seemed pretty incredible at the time. Maybe it was a bit overkill though.

I agree, Firefox address bar is miles ahead of any other browser. I just hope they don't mess it up in the name of UX

As we speak the Mozilla CEO, on reading this comment, is probably saying "see, they love our innovative addressbar; so we should focus innovation efforts entirely on that, make it entirely new, ... nothing stays the same ... we could make it vertical!" ...

It still has issues. It sucks when trying to find a previous page if there are 3 or more results for the same search term. Which happens when researching and clicking on multiple links.

Still awesome though.

All I want is tab to search. Actual, identical-to-omnibar tab to search.

If you have the focus in the address bar and press Tab, Firefox puts you into search mode (while retaining focus in the address bar) using your default search engine. Is there something missing?

I'm using Firefox right now. When I highlight in the bar and press tab, ONLY when the drop-down bar is showing, it moves the cursor down one to Amazon, which is not my default search engine, but the first one alphabetically.

So that doesn't work.

I also don't want to search my default search engine. I want tab to search for the panoply of websites that the omnibox will search. When I start typing ebay, I want "tab to search ebay".

I know I can set them up manually (a pain, but might be worth the investment to avoid the google overlord), however, I still don't get the "tab to search blah" function with a keyword. I have to type the keyword exactly -instead of having tab function as autocomplete- then space for my query.

What I want is omnibox tab to search.

> When I start typing ebay, I want "tab to search ebay".

You can configure Firefox to do this with a single checkbox. Go to Settings, click Privacy & Security on the side, go down to the Address Bar section, and make sure that "Search engines" is selected.

When I do that, I can click in the address bar (which brings up the drop-down), type "ebay", and then you'll see "Search with eBay" appear below in the drop-down, and then a single Tab puts it into eBay search mode.

I think that's just because the ebay search engine is installed by default? They want this to work for any site with a search engine they've ever visited - at least, that's how it works in Chrome, IIRC.

I also remember missing that feature dearly when I switched from Chrome to Firefox. However, some time in the intervening decade, they've actually added that to Firefox! I can type "<Ctrl-L>ebay<TAB>esp32<ENTER>" and I end up on the eBay search page for "esp32". Perhaps there is a setting or about:config option that needs to be toggled? Many of Firefox's best features are thusly hidden.

Actual search or autofill segment?

Autofill segment would be really useful, and no modern thing seem to be able to do it. But tab to search doesn't look very useful to me.

Same here. I have a lot of bookmarks, and the bar finds it.

For me it's the history of visited addresses. I can navigate the tree of urls typing very little. It feels like a trie.

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