Hacker News Reader

Comment by klez | Hacker News Reader

On my work laptop I use Chrome. There are a couple of things I sorely miss from Firefox

* The omnibar: I have a couple IPs I connect to frequently. One ends in 36, the other in 243. In Firefox I can just type 36 (or 243) + Tab + Enter. In Chrome I have to type the whole address. And why can't I search for the title of a page I know is in my history or even just a tab I already have opened directly from the search bar? I do that all the time in Firefox

* Ctrl+Tab to switch back and forth between tabs instead of cycling them in order (not the default in Firefox either, but at least it can be configured without having to install an extension and a native executable as I had to do in Chrome)

View on HN

> Ctrl+Tab to switch back and forth between tabs instead of cycling them in order (not the default...

I recently started using Firefox, after giving up on Windows, and recently found out about this feature. It's a godsend for productivity, especially in a world where a lot of things are done in a browser.

> In Chrome I have to type the whole address. And why can't I search for the title of a page I know is in my history or even just a tab I already have opened directly from the search bar? I do that all the time in Firefox

You can't do that because that would lead to less people seeing the Google Search page, and therefore less ad impressions.

People been complaining about that for decades at this point, and Google just refuses to fix it, pretty clear why.

> And why can't I search for the title of a page I know is in my history

I sometimes use Edge as a fallback browser, and it suffers from this problem, too, and yeah, it is sooo annoying – much as I'm unhappy about various Firefox changes in the last years, I wouldn't switch to a different browser for that alone.

Interestingly, Edge (and probably Chrome, too, unless it's a strange Microsoft customisation) simultaneously suffers from the problem that on the rare occasion where an addressbar search actually delivers a locally history result, the autocomplete is often too precise, because it prefills the whole URL, not just the domain.

Omnibar is unsurpassed in browser usability. Some of my work involves project names in an obscure part of the URL (everything else is the same base/parameters).

FF handles this perfectly, no other browser I've tried comes close.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com