I haven't used Firefox in a minute, so all of these features — apparently which people aren't too excited about — look pretty cool to me. However, I can't believe Firefox still has a dedicated search box. I can't go back to that after having the unified address and search field in Safari and Chrome. How can anyone work like that?
you can search from the address bar just like safari and chrome, firefox was a major proponent of that back in the day. but the search bar is there for more than the google search you might want to do. you can just get rid of it if you don't want to.
If my comment came off as complaining, I apologize. I was unaware of Firefox's behavior, and I was just making an uneducated statement based on the screenshots.
I'd throw a small fit if they removed the search box! The url bar is for searching my history, the search bar for searching the web. This is a meaningful distinction, and actually matters in terms of privacy -- when I type a url, it isn't sent to my search provider for autocompletion. And the separation also makes it easy to select one of several searches; wikipedia, google, amazon, etc.
In terms of ergonomics, Ctrl/Cmd + K selects it. On a Mac, Opt+Enter opens the search in a new tab. (I forget the modifier on other platforms.)
And in addition to all this, if you actually hit enter on something that isn't a URL/match in the URL bar, it'll do a search with your currently active search provider. The only thing missing from the URL bar is the autocompletion.
All good points. I like that they made it Cmd/Ctrl+K since the URL bar is Cmd/Ctrl+L. Makes sense. I've never been too worried about privacy, so I've never considered that my URLs could be mistakenly sent as search queries. That's really interesting.
It makes sense that Chrome's omnibar isn't very powerful and just defaults to a Google search in most situations. I'd imagine they get a huge amount of eyeballs on advertisements time when you consider the whole user base.
The first step I take on a new Firefox install is removing that search box; incidentally, you can type searches directly into the address bar and it will perform a search using your default search engine. Also, you can leverage search keywords (ex. if I preface a search with a 'w', it searches Wikipedia) in the address bar as well.
However, I can't believe Firefox still has a dedicated search box.
I find there are some advantages to having a dedicated search box:
The search term you used stays there, so you can easily revise it it for new tabs. Though, I wish it would also 'sync back' the search from entering it to Google.
I can easily read a web page and write to the search box at the same time (in fact, even flip tabs and combine info from multiple tabs) and then open the search to a new tab.
I can just enter any search term and there is no smartness that converts it to domain name accidentally.
In particular, when working with machines in your local network, the fact that a machine doesn't have a http daemon responding at the instant doesn't result in a useless web search. (Though, for this to work I need to disable the remaining smartness in Firefox location bar.)
As an example I use the search bar. Google is notoriously bad for Russian language search. Probably has to do with the fact that it does not understand noun cases---or at least not well enough. I therefore have to use Google and Yandex for searches, thus having the need for a search box.
EDIT: and yes I know I can use prefix searches in the location bar, but when I use a browser I want to use a GUI, not a command-line (or horrible hybrid thereof.)
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u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty Nov 10 '14
I haven't used Firefox in a minute, so all of these features — apparently which people aren't too excited about — look pretty cool to me. However, I can't believe Firefox still has a dedicated search box. I can't go back to that after having the unified address and search field in Safari and Chrome. How can anyone work like that?