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Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

There’s an old mantra from organizing: “no permanent enemies, no permanent allies.” You will never align with another group or person 100% on all things; the secret to making change is to build a coalition of those with whom you agree on an issue without holding it against them that you disagree on a different one.

I disagree with Mozilla about many things, but I agree with this article - I use Firefox because it’s the only browser out there that isn’t Chrome or WebKit, and that’s worth enough to me that I’m willing to disagree with them on other issues.

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It's also better that the other browser in many ways. The "Awesome Bar" among them.

middle mouse click auto-scrolling too!

What's different about the Awesome Bar from Chrome? IIRC Chrome had the unified search/URL bar before Firefox did, and I don't remember it being very different from Firefox's implementation. If anything, I remember it being easier to add search engines in Chrome (unless it's gotten worse in the past few years since I switched to Firefox).

Am I missing out on cool features of the URL bar in Firefox?

Edit: made my question more specific

firefox still support ublock origins

I was very narrowly asking about the "Awesome Bar", the example the GP comment mentioned as being better than Chrome.

Among other things, it's less about searching the web, and more about reliably surfacing your history and bookmarks and already open tabs.

This is what bugs me every time I have to use Chrome. I know why Chrome does it, it has every incentive to put people through search at every opportunity. There is no way to put results from the history on top.

But you can do that in Firefox.

I'm sure it varies from person to person, but I find it very frustrating to use Chrome's equivalent of the "Awesome Bar" when I'm forced to (eg work computer); Firefox just seems to do a much better job of surfacing open tabs (yes, I'm a tab hoarder), bookmarks, history, etc while Chrome seems like it'll surface some dubiously relevant options and try to railroad you into search. Even when I know I have a tab open and I know the domain name or a substantial chunk of the title it is legitimately rare for Chrome to offer to switch me to that tab, and often times it will surface one or two tabs that seem utterly unrelated. Bafflingly bad performance from what used to be a search company.

Firefox doesn't report every keystroke put into the Awesome bar back to Mozilla, AFAIK.

It does (to the search engine you use) unless you turn off "Show search suggestions in address bar results".

I don't think you can turn that off in Chrome

Not sure if chrome has an equivalent but FF bar allows limiting results, e.g. adding a single % in the bar will search tabs, ^ history, * bookmarks, (+ searchs tagged bookmarks? there's no shiny icon)...

Worth knowing: you can also use @tabs, @history, @bookmarks, etc. now. Way easier to remember :)

You can start typing words that were in either the title or the URL of some thing you vaguely remember visiting last month, or last year, and the Awesome Bar will reliably surface it for you. I hardly even use bookmarks; I just count on the Awesome Bar finding everything for me. If I had to choose between it and uBlock Origin, I wouldn't even have to think twice. Ads I can deal with, if I have to. I've been outsourcing my memory for the web to the Awesome Bar for decades. It's part of my brain.

I know Chrome's address bar also does searches, but somehow I find it much worse at actually finding what I want. It's perhaps unfair since I use Firefox much more, but I visit some pages regularly in Chrome and I'm 90% sure suddenly it doesn't find these - or they are just ranked way off.

Firefox also find open tabs (so you can jump to the open tab instead of opening a new tab) and allow you to explicitly search for bookmarks, open-tabs etc. The open tab thing is also nicely integrated with Firefox sync (not sure if Chrome has something similar)

I might be the odd one out but I hate the awesome bar. What I do like about Firefox is I can make the awesome bar just a boring address bar and have a separate search bar.

I like this, and I also think it will help this Canadian deal with the current position of the USA

It's absolutely critical, and worth mentioning, that even after substantial reductions, there are a lot of Canadians still working on and contributing to Firefox!

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