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Comment by nemetroid | Hacker News Reader

> Improved search experience through the location bar [1]

Really happy to see this one. Previously single-word searches were so slow that I'd usually have time to remember that they are slow, press C-e, and enter the same search term in the search bar, all before the browser realises there is no matching host and does a web search instead.

1: http://msujaws.wordpress.com/2014/08/01/faster-and-snappier-...

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I really hope this also fixes Firefox's behavior with one word searches and misbehaving DNS servers. Previously, if your DNS server returned advertising for bad DNS queries, one word "searches" would result in displaying your DNS server's ad page (since Firefox did a DNS query, assuming you meant a hostname instead of a one word search). This has been broken behavior in Firefox for quite awhile, with no workaround other than to install a different omnibar. I don't understand why Mozilla thought treating single words as hostnames in the omnibar made sense for the majority of people, especially when the majority of people are also subjected to misbehaving DNS servers.

You shouldn't be searching in the URL bar. There is a search bar for that. If anything, it should be a toggle to allow searches to execute from URL bar input, but for IT folks and others who recognize the distinction, searches from the URL bar are frustrating and insecure.

Do you have research to back up the statement that "searches from the URL bar are frustrating"? I could cite Chrome's market share as an indirect, empirical study indicating the contrary.

Regardless, your comment is tangential to mine. My comment was about a bug in an existing Firefox feature. Whether that feature should exist in the first place or not is only tangentially related.

I'm pretty sure Chrome's market share is more related to it being advertised on TV, google.com, and being bundled with other software than because of the Omnibar...

There's "you shouldn't be ..." and then there's "what most people outside the tech world do". There is a lot of overlap between the two. In the real world, for whatever reason, many people use the location bar as a search box.

Now, I'm not agreeing with FF's decision; just pointing out how it is IRL.

Additionally, in the real world, people use the google search field as a URL bar. It really boils down to people just not understanding how things work / are supposed to be used.

You took the words right out of my mouth! I have worked on dozens of sites in all different industries and the one thing that unites them all: Google Analytics traffic shows that many people punch in a full domain name into Google and rely on Google to display the result they want.

If your website is http://hackastack.com I doubt you'd go a month without seeing a referral from Google for a search for www.hackastack.com or something similar, even if you don't use 'www' on your site

Since Firefox tells users to "Search or enter address" in the location bar, I don't think it's correct to tell users trying to search that they're using it wrong. The issue described by fpgaminer is a legitimate problem.

The fact that some may prefer stricter segregation between URL and search fields is a separate issue, as is the behavior by certain ISPs that triggers this problem.

That's actually the thing I want to make sure I can entirely disable before even thinking of updating to FF33. I'm sick of browsers and other software trying their best to send as much data as they can to search engines (hi google). If I want to perform a search, I do it, period. I know it's absolutely not the case for most users, though..

I'm pretty sure that Firefox doesn't send anything from the location bar. At least, my location bar doesn't perform any search outside of history + bookmarks, unless I press "return".

Nope. On FF33, when I type in a one-word, no-TLD hostname in location bar, it takes me to my default search engine, while asking "Do you want to go to hostname?"

The whole point of having separate bars is to clearly distinguish use, and to ensure data doesn't leak. This bothers me, too.

> On FF33, when I type in a one-word, no-TLD hostname in location bar, it takes me to my default search engine, while asking "Do you want to go to hostname?"

Do you mean after you press enter? I can't replicate your finding for words that are simply typed into the location bar.

Note that you can use `//` prefix to mean `http://`. E.g. if you want to go to `http://foo`, you type `//foo` in the address bar. You can also use `//` URLs in HTML, it expands to `http://` or `https://` depending if the page is served via HTTP or HTTPS (this is cross-browser)

And use the ? prefix for searches from the address bar that would otherwise be interpreted as something else, also cross-browser.

that's an interesting one. I usually use a single quotation mark when searching a URL since Google doesn't interpret it as "verbatim" anymore and seems to just discard it.

Does this actually work in address bar? Both FF and Chrome open file://... URL if you type //...

Did you type // and not \\ ? \\ does expand to file:/// for me, trying to open a network share. But // to file:/// never happened to me.

BTW, actually it seems that if I type `//foo` and `http://foo/` can't be resolved by DNS server/hosts file, Firefox does Google search, while Chrome tells that 'webpage is not available'.

Note also that some browsers want to fix http://foo to http://www.foo.com - for Firefox, see [1] and [2]

[1] about:config?filter=browser.fixup

[2] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:config_Entr...

I typed // (OS X)

This is tested in latest Nightly:

Open up: about:config?filter=keyword.enabled

Set it to false.

Now things like "bjafbsaofbdnaspolnas" will just end up at "http://www.bjafbsaofbdnaspolnas.com/".

I use a bookmark keyword for this, so I prefix all my searches with "g ". Speed guaranteed!

You can also put a question mark before the word

I thought I was the only one having that problem.... my fix was to add a " ." to any search that was one word.

forgot to do that for a search this morning and found this has been fixed!

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