Firefoxs omnibar history search is significantly better than chromes; although i imagine that is down to them having no stake in sending google searches which google obviously does

Recently switched to firefox and am quite happy to see it has lots of feature I didn't think it had.

Chrome allows me to do use the built-in search engine of any website supporting it by pressing tab and then typing my search query. In firefox, it seems what I have to do is type my search query than use my mouse to click on the wikipedia icon (or amazon/etc). This also requires me to setup said search engine in firefox preferences. Ain't there anyway I can get that search experience using only the keyboard?

The search box is separate in Firefox (next to the address bar). You can get to it by typing Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on Mac). Once you type your query, you can use the Down Arrow or Tab key to navigate to the site/engine you want to use and then hit Enter. You can also rearrange the order of those search engines to make the frequently used ones easier to reach.

If you don't mind a network round trip, you can also setup DuckDuckGo as your default search engine and use bang commands [1] to do different kinds of searches on many sites.

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Fantastic, did that.

You can do this sort of search in Firefox as well. Right click on pretty much any search box, then click "Add a Keyword for this Search..." You'll get an add-bookmark dialog that you can put a keyword into (e.g. "w" for Wikipedia) -- I like to save the resulting bookmark in "Unsorted Bookmarks" so that it doesn't clutter up my menus. After that just typing "w Firefox<enter>" in your address bar will bring up the Wikipedia page for Firefox.

In the search settings you can setup shortcuts, like 'y' for youtube.

Then you can just type 'y rick roll' to make a search.

Alternatively, set your default browser to duckduckgo.org and use it's bangs, no need to manually add shortcuts!

The previous example would then be '!y rick roll'.

Ctrl + k, type search query, press tab, select search engine or add the one on the current page if it has any.

Much obliged.

Firefox is never going to lose me as a user as long as the awesome Tree-style tabs extension - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

is supported on it. It completely changed my browsing experience, and I cannot use any other browser except for quick, temporary browsing (like how one might use Notepad on Windows in a bind).

I'd highly, highly recommend this extension to anyone who has never had the pleasure to use it.

Looks like a ton of similar extensions exist for Chrome as well.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...

Chrome doesn't support the APIs needed to make a full Tree-style Tabs replacement. Anything that attempts to do it by necessity runs in a separate window disconnected from your browser.

So it's there, but it's nowhere near as seamless and convenient as it is in Firefox.

As @slavak mentions, Chrome APIs are far more hobbled and every tree-style implementation I've seen has been glaringly deficient in comparison to Tree-style-tabs on Firefox. TST should be the way all browsers handle tabs, especially considering that vertical screen real-estate is far more expensive. I've been using it for 6+ years and can't imagine browsing any other way.

This is an amazing add-on. Thanks!

I like that Firefox Test Pilots often produce interesting, visible experiments.

I'm a fan of Firefox Color: https://color.firefox.com - which allows you to express the UI color scheme in a shareable/saveable URL.

There's also Side View: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/side-view - which allows a persistent column to the side regardless of which tab you're in. Useful on widescreens.

I've been using Email Tabs to share my browsing research: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/email-tabs/

For instance, I'll queue up a bunch of infant related tabs to email to my wife. If I'm unsure whether the site will stand the test of time, I can send the entire article (with an index) to her in the email as a kind of archive. I've also been sending myself my programming-related tabs when I go down a particularly deep rabbit hole.

Weird, why is Side View in Test Pilot now? They had something like this[1] for a long, long time - I can find references to it dating back to 2007 - in the form of the "load this bookmark in the sidebar" toggle.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Add-ons/Cod...

I was about to try Side View yesterday -- I usually run two Firefox windows side by side anyway -- but I couldn't be bothered to find out what data exactly they would extract from it[1], and I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt. I fully expected to find it as a standalone extension, but if it exists, I couldn't find it.

[1] By proceeding, you agree to the terms and privacy policies of Test Pilot and the Side View privacy policy.

> I fully expected to find it as a standalone extension, but if it exists, I couldn't find it.

It can be installed from here: https://testpilot.firefox.com/files/[email protected]/la...

(From their GitHub page.[1])

Also note that the Test Pilot page [2] contains a summary of the data they collect. Most notably:

> Side View does not collect any information about sites you visit.

The data is does collect seems related to whether and how you use it - it is an experiment, after all.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/side-view

[2] https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/side-view

SideView just changed my life, this very moment.

1. I really dislike the firefox omnibar and that I can't set it to just be an address bar. I sometimes visit washingtonpost.com but not often enough that I have a bookmark, and every time firefox insists it should be wasingtonpost.com.co, which I must have visited at some point but it is not bookmarked and the suggestion never goes away (I have firefox set to clear history when exiting, but I tried to do a "clear now" and it still appears). This means I can't type washingtonpost.com and go to washingtonpost.com, which is all I really want from typing in an address bar.

3. userChrome.css is poorly documented but a nice option, not sure if Chrome has something similar. I have firefox set so that each tab is just a favicon and an extra pixel on each side. It mostly works well, except at some point the audio icon started appearing (it didn't when I first made the change) and it appears over the next tab, that makes it impossible or nearly impossible to directly select the next tab.

5. Reader mode is exellent if you use a more comprehensive javascript blocker, since many pages work in reader mode that wouldn't otherwise. Hopefully this isn't because it is actually running some javascript in reader mode or otherwise avoiding the usual blocking rules.

I think the reason there is a focus on "firefox is better than crome in some fundamental ways" is that once you get down to individual features they both change frequently and a feature that one person likes might really annoy someone else. The reasons to avoid chrome are not likely to change unless firefox gets as bad as chrome. If you convince someone to switch for some random feature then there is a much better chance they will switch back in a few releases when the random feature breaks in some way. Additionally, it isn't clear that firefox has an opportunity to convince all that many end users.

That being said, anyone who wants to do a feature comparison should go ahead and do it. The article seems to be saying "the real problem here is that other people are writing about the differences they care about".

1. Try to type wasingtonpost.com.co and press delete (more generally - hover the mouse over a url-suggestion and pressing the "delete" button will remove it from history.

Very strange that clearing the history doesn't resolve it though..

I tried that on each character where it shows that completion after seeing your initial suggestion, but it didn't help (it makes the suggestion go away that time, but it is shown again next time). I finally figured out that I had bookmarked a scam page under washingtonpost.com.co at one point and deleting that made it stop (I looked before but must have typoed the address). The confusing part is that it didn't complete to the full bookmarked page and didn't show the star like it does for everything else. And I did have the home page of the Washington Post bookmarked, just not in an accessible place to click on it, so I don't know why it didn't choose to autocomplete to that.

Also, I found browser.urlbar.autoFill that gets it to not modify what I type but still show suggestions from bookmarks. I think I had tried to disable browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled at some point and enabled it again since it is sometimes helpful to quickly find bookmarked pages. It still searches if the entered text doesn't look like a domain name or url and there seems to be no way to disable that. Still, I appreciate that Firefox is configurable in a lot of ways and that there is a way to get it to mostly do what I want :).

"I really dislike the firefox omnibar and that I can't set it to just be an address bar."

Me too. I've hated that thing since it was first introduced.

regarding your first point, I believe you can make the address bar behave like you want simply by Edit->Preferences->Uncheck 'Provide Search Suggestions' and removing a result from your address bar results with shift-delete might also be what you're missing

Thanks for the suggestions. Unchecking 'Provide Search Suggestions' didn't help and I already had 'Show search suggestions in address bar results' unchecked. Shift-delete didn't help either. I made a somewhat longer reply to the sibbling comment of your comment but it turned out I did have a sub-page of washingtonpost.com.co bookmarked and for some reason it was just completing to the domain name and not showing the star. Deleting that fixed the problem. I also found browser.urlbar.autoFill to make it stop changing what I type. So yay firefox configurability.

Also tab containers are fantastic.

Not fantastic, but necessary in any web development activity. Being logged in as different users in the same browser, while at the same time not suffering from the limitations private mode has. Makes testing and developing very easy and saved me a lot of time.

if only i could open a container without automatically loading all tabs inside it, but lazy loaded like when you restart the browser and only the active tab is loaded.

bookmark tags are probably going to be the next to go when Firefox decides "too few people are using it".

No, that’s bookmark keywords, which are not widely used and difficult to discover, and for which there’s a rough alternative in search engines. I believe it’s on the chopping block, or at least it looked to be a few months ago, as I discovered when looking through Bugzilla to see about exposing bookmark keywords to WebExtensions so that I could make an extension that would implement DuckDuckGo’s !bangs in the browser.

Tags, on the other hand, are actually shown in the regular UI without needing to open the full bookmark manager. Much more discoverable, at least.

If they get rid of bookmark keywords, without some other equivalent mechanism (i.e. one that lets me set up URL bar commands so that "wp X" -> roughly "en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X", "g" -> "mail.google.com/u/0/h", and so on), then I will be really annoyed.

It’s possible to use search engines instead, but creating your own basically requires you to find or craft a search box that is equivalent to the desired action. It’s in no way easy to work with (not like making a bookmark with the %s placeholder), and isn’t quite as pleasant to use in the awesome bar either. I’m with you that removing bookmark keywords would be very annoying at present.

Note that it should be pretty easy to write an add-on that generates a search provider. It's just a simple (and open-standard) xml format.

Not enough time to write one myself these days, but if keywords disappear, I might.

To alleviate the pain somewhat, I switched a while ago to setting DuckDuckGo as my default browser, and simply using their bangs. Saves a lot of configuration when setting up a new browser, and all the expected ones (!w, !yt, !g, etc.) work.

s/browser/search engine/

Well, they did improvements around keywords lately - whenever I type my keywords now they are highlighted in the URL field

Firefox is also more touch friendly on Windows 10. If I touch the menu button or touch-and-hold to bring up the menu, the menu items are spaced wider to make it easier to touch the required option.

Chrome on Windows 10 doesn't appear to differentiate between tapping and mouse clicking on a menu item. The spacing between items remains the same narrow spacing, making it somewhat harder to select the correct item using touch.

I've noticed that Firefox's awesomebar does a full text search, and will find the text you've entered in the middle of words, but Chrome doesn't.

For example, I have bookmarked my blog (theandrewbailey.com) in both. Typing "rew" into Firefox suggests my blog. Chrome doesn't, and I need to type it out from the beginning in order for it to get the clue.

6) Even better: Built-in Tracking Protection can likely serve the same use case and gives you better performance, because jumping into JavaScript code and back for every request is costly (it's not a high cost, depending on hardware though).

i wish i could prioritize the search suggestions in the search/addressbar: tabs first, then bookmarks, and only then history. or make three groups, and give me the top 3 tabs, top 3 bookmarks and top 3 history matches.

Not quite what you described and maybe you already know this, but you can prefix (or postfix) your query with %, *, or ^. This will restrict the results to tabs, bookmarks, or history, respectively.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...

i didn't know that. thank you! that's going to be a huge help, because like some others here, i have hundreds of tabs open and am often searching for one that i knew i had already opened.

About the omnibar: does anyone know what its limitations are? It seems to lose sites I only use somewhat infrequently. It's frustrating when I know I've been there plenty of times, but nothing pops up.

Might be because the browser history is limited by default: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1039372

Details on the ranking algorithm: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/Places...

Thanks! That might be it.

For future notice though, the answer in the first link is wrong; you want "places.history.expiration.current_max_pages", not "places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages". Apparently the max "pages" are automatically calculated by default- mine was around 160k, so my history only went back about 2.5 years. I've set it to the maximum value for a 32 bit integer, which I guess should fix the problem for the next 20 or so years.

Kind of annoying that Firefox's default is to delete things when you told it not to delete things.

They do it for performance reasons, but I've not noticed any slowdowns yet at least. Still - would be better if they had a limit on how long back they searched instead of actually deleting data. That would most likely be more work ofc.

These differences do not affect the general audience's choice (except maybe #6, but it's a non-standard setup which means it requires multi-step user opt-in which is non-obvious to the market). They're hardly differences at all. Imagine if we were asked to pick between another two pieces of same-purpose software, we'd see such a list as saying they are essentially the same thing.