> For me the most jarring thing is how Firefox’s omnibar works. It isn’t good at showing me the sites I’m looking for after typing just a few characters. Instead, it shows absolutely every page I’ve recently visited at one of those sites.

Interesting! I think this may be a case where, over time, as you use a search mechanism, you get used to the kinds of searches that work well with that mechanism. I've had similarly frustrating experiences with Chrome's address bar, which I'm not used to using.

Firefox has a concept of "frecency", a metric that combines frequency of visit and recency of visit to determine what you're most likely to want based on what you typed. (It also gives some preference to the starts of words/domains, and some other heuristics.) However, I can easily believe that before Firefox has enough information, typing at it would produce suboptimal results. That's something worth reporting as a bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&c... . Please feel free to use any of the text above to help describe the issue, if it helps.

> Another design thing is the amount of information on the default new page has a ton more info than I’m used to seeing (or really want to see).

Complete agreement. I disable the new tab page on desktop, as I really just want a blank page. (On mobile, I find the default new tab page more useful and usable.)

When I type in ‘news.’ Firefox still gives me ‘hackernewsgrid.com’ as the first result, even though I haven’t visited that page in years, and in fact it is completely down.

I’m not sure how the omnibar works, but I’m not extremely impressed.

When I type “n”, I’m likely either going to news.google.com or HN. Firefox will guess correctly that I’m thinking of HN and fills that in as the URL. However, the main HN URL and Google News are something like 8 and 9 in the list. Everything above those two is a mix of things that happen to have an “n” somewhere in the URL that I may have recently visited.

As the grandparent comment says, you just get used to how Firefox works. For example, I would've never even thought to type "news" to look for hackernews in the omnibar after using it so long-- I just instinctively know that Firefox will find it easier based on domain name, so I type "yc" for "ycombinator.com"

I can see how this is going to be confusing for a new Firefox user, but it's easy to get used to.

Note: this is different b/w the desktop and iOS versions too. The desktop seems to have gradually gotten better as it’s been trained more.

(And I have Firefox sync setup)

Type ‘news’, use the arrow keys to select the offending entry, and hit delete.

Just type news<space>y then until it gets used to it.

(And on a general note: some people here might want to verify they haven't touched the settings;-)

I have several sites that I visit daily. All of them can be accessed by typing in the first character, or, at most, two characters - the url then appears in the navbar, just hit <enter>.

The strange thing is, every nine months or so, FF will forget one of these urls. It doesn't do it for all of them at once, just one, and it's not related to upgrades. All I have to do is enter the full url and hit enter, and things are back to normal again for that particular url for many months.