> The first one is the tab research feature. It available for many years in chrome I don't understand why it's still missing in firefox. I can't type "yo [hit tab] my video" to find a video on youtube.

If I understand you correctly: In firefox you set this up by 1) Create a bookmark 2) Edit it, and a) insert %s where you want "my video" to go, and b) give it a keyword, e.g. "yo".

Now you can use it by typing "yo my video" (no tabbing).

It's been in Firefox since circa 2006.

(To continue the example, the url for the youtube bookmark should be: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s )

I use Fx as my main browser, but the quick search feature in Fx is miles behind Chrome's.

1. In chrome, you don't need to manually add anything; you don't need to assign a keyword that you have to memorize. All the websites that you frequent that support OpenSearch will be automatically added by Chrome and you use their domain as keyword. I can now type en + tab to search on Wikipedia, as well as hundreds of other websites (no exaggeration) without manually configuring anything.

And on top of that, if you want to manually add anything (maybe it doesn't have OpenSearch), or assign a different keyword like Fx, you can still do that in chrome://settings/searchEngines, like Firefox.

2. Chrome's quick search supports auto completion. Firefox's doesn't.

It was not a big problem for me before the change of the Search Bar in Fx, since you can very easily add OpenSearch engines there and get auto completion too. But the new "One Click" makes it very hard to use (particularly the auto completion part). Now I have straight up given up search bar.

Those two features combined end up sending keystrokes to third parties in a way that is not transparent to users, and they haven’t consented to it, either.

I prefer Firefox’s defaults on both counts.

Fair enough, but there is no way to change to that even if I consent to send my keystrokes for auto completion.

Also, Firefox has auto completion on by default on its default search engine, which is Google no less. So I'm not sure why this topic is about privacy other than purely technical.

Firefox doesn't have auto completion on Google. Rather, there's one of two other things going on:

- Google has auto completion on Google through a bit of JavaScript.

- Firefox has auto completion on all text input fields that don't specifically disable it and aren't password fields.

As a portal to the internet, I'm quite happy that Firefox doesn't modify specific individual websites, even if they are Google (the anti tracking features are/should not be hardcoded values, but rather behavioral).

I'm talking about auto completion in search (in address bar or search bar), which by default is Google. Not talking about Google website, or any text area in webpage in general.

>I'm quite happy that Firefox..

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with that too. The one I replied to seems not happy about the behavior that you can get auto-completion results from search engines in Chrome, because that "end up sending keystrokes to third parties". I was simply pointing out Firefox did that too with default search engine, just not when you're using keyword to call other engines; which IMO implies it's purely a technical limitation, not a privacy choice.

You can add OpenSearch engines from the "..." menu in the address bar, but it doesn't show an indicator like the search bar.

Suggestions for keyword searches will be fixed in the next release.[1]

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1496814

Thanks for the reply!

Unfortunately it doesn't fix the problem that I have to add keywords for all of them manually

For the first thing, you're talking about "keyword search" (as ever, knowing the right term to use when you're searching makes all the difference, and good luck if you don't know the right term)

It's present in Firefox and has been for several years now. I use it extensively both with internal and external sites, e.g. I type "people joe blogs" in to my browser and it opens up our internal phone directory and searches for the person.

It's super simple to set up:

Go to the desired site. Right click on the search field, and choose "Add a Keyword for this search". Pick a name for the bookmark, and then pick a keyword to go with it.

That's it, job done :)

If you use DDG as your primary search engine, you can use ! commands to redirect to search on other sites (like YouTube !yt, Wikipedia !w, etc...). Using your example, you could just do "!yt my video"

>The first one is the tab research feature. It available for many years in chrome I don't understand why it's still missing in firefox. I can't type "yo [hit tab] my video" to find a video on youtube.

This is the main reason I switched back to Chrome after trying Firefox shortly after the release and Quantum and just recently. You can manually create search shortcuts in Firefox, but this is incredibly inconvenient if you make heavy use of this feature as I do. With Chrome, I can visit a new page and it will immediately offer tab-to-search when I type the first letters of the page's URL.

It's a pity because I really wanted to switch, but I couldn't get used to this.

> And the second feature missing is the search highlight in the scrollbar. It's a mandatory feature for my when searching on a long page (like this one for example) to search for "firefox" and find in the scrollbar everywhere it is.

I don't see how this is mandatory, you can just use the next/previous-result buttons (F3 / Shift-F3) to go to each result, but I guess it would make it much easier to establish some context as to where you are on the page, especially after you've jumped to the next search result.

You can assign keywords to alternate search engines in Firefox.

Apparently there's an extension for the scrollbar thing (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/highlightall/) although I can't quite imagine why it would be more useful than just visiting the search results sequentially.

The first feature is actually present in Firefox. You need to go into the search preferences, click on manage search engines and there you can customize the search shortcuts you want to use. If you want you can also use the handles that invoke the open search plugins, like @google if you want to search using Google.