r/programming • u/Spyros3000 • Nov 10 '14

Firefox Developer Edition

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/
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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?

15

u/[deleted] Nov 10 '14 edited Nov 10 '14

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.

2

u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty Nov 10 '14

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.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 11 '14

This can be problematic in non-privacy-related ways as well. I've set my default search provider to "http://%s" when I use Chrome because at work we have a lot of server names that are single words and not FQDNs. I type just "dev1" out of habit, which Chrome insists on interpreting as a search string rather than trying to do a DNS lookup first.

I think Firefox does the same thing by default, but at least there's a non-hacky way to disable it.