It's not that cumbersome in Chrome. Right click the URL bar -> "Edit search engines" -> Find the search engine you'd like to easily search, double click the second column and enter a keyword for it. For example, for wikipedia, I have "wp" as a keyword. In the URL bar, you can just type "wp<tab>" and you can search wikipedia.

you don't even have to do any configuration. after you've used a search box that's correctly formatted (like wikipedia's is) chrome automatically offers you the option to "press tab to search" when you start typing that's site's url.

Yep, I use this feature all the time and I think there's only ever been one or two sites I've had to set it up for manually. For most sites, Ctrl+T <First 2-3 Letters of Site Name> <Tab> <Search Query> <Enter> works just fine without me having to configure anything.

The level of customization offered in Firefox is a nice benefit though, as you can add a wildcard to any portion of a URL.

I have some specific shortcuts like wdir (walking directions from my home address) and some shortcuts that allow me to quickly jump to subsections of specific sites.

You don't even need to use the tab key. It automatically works for me just from pressing space after the keyword in Chrome. In the end, the usage is identical to FF.

Set DuckDuckGo as your default search engine and you don't even need to do any configuring. You can then just type `!wiki India` or `!gi birds` or any other !bang: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

I've tried that, and while it is nice and useable it is also significantly slower, going through DDG for one more complete roundtrip, than it is going directly to a URL you already know.

I've had one of these for YouTube for years, really excellent feature.

Opening a new tab with yt <songname> is such a habit now.

Exactly the same for me!