You can do this in Chromium as well. So it might be Chromium's best kept secret too.

As far as I know, you can do it in all major browsers (probably not safari though)

You can do it in Raycast along with a lot of other shortcuts outside of web browsers. I actually like it better through Raycast because it acts as a universal search, app launcher, calculator, 1Password interface, etc. that's always available and not dependent on a browser.

There's a plugin that does this for Safari: https://apps.apple.com/app/keyword-search/id1558453954

How does one search open tabs in Chrome?

Ctrl+shift+a or click that little arrow at the top right of the window and you can search there.

I also just saw this https://blog.google/products/chrome/search-your-tabs-bookmar...

I think I like the shorter Firefox version better but this is maybe easier to remember at first

I thought I was a power user....

Non power users would use this more if the docs, marketing and promotion of it was prominent and talked about (or made to look "sexy" for lack of a better word). I think what we're seeing is that the "UX" folk have hijacked the conversation and made it so that it is the only expression of the capabilities an app has for user interaction.

I'm sitting here, recalling all my chats and meetings and workshops with UX folk, and not once can I recall the topic of keyboard shortcuts or tab sequence being brought up. It was all about color, branding, spacing, user flow, "journeys", "experience", conversion funnels, and all things visual.

Ctrl+Shift+A works in Edge too, they don't have the caret as a search dialog handle though. TIL. Includes recently closed tabs too.

By starting your search with "@tabs" You can change that behavior on in the settings

Interestingly, in Microsoft Edge, entering `%` does the same as typing `@tabs <tab>`. And `^` as `@history`.

I think he meant the custom website keyword search.

I did mean that, but it is possible to search for tabs, history, or bookmarks by starting your search with an @. E.g. `@tabs ycombinator`

This bookmarklet will work:

  (function () { let sel = window.getSelection(); let Qr; if (sel && sel.toString().length > 0) {Qr=sel.toString()} else {Qr=prompt('Search Site for','');} let hna=window.location.hostname; if(Qr) {  location.href='http://www.google.com/search?&q=site:'+encodeURIComponent(hna)+'+'+escape(Qr)  }})();

You can attach to a keyboard shortcut with a launcher or applescript.

Ctrl+Shift+A

yep, just hit up 'manage search engines' and add a shortcut. I use this to navigate to servicenow documents when someone IMs me their number, one of my most used workflow helpers.

    https://<your servicenow base url>/text_search_exact_match.do?sysparm_search=%s

Funny enough, I just posted on Mastodon looking for recommendations of other browsers to try.

While I love the flexibility and openness that Firefox brings, there is a resource issue for me on my macbook pro. I have to spend a lot of time in Google Meets for work, and video conferencing via Firefox seems to redline the computer... It sounds like a jet engine and I wind up thermal throttling to the point that my machine becomes completely unresponsive.

I'd love to stay with Firefox - especially for the cross-device tab sharing and search - but the need for something stable is superseding my want to use a non-Google browser.

I wonder if Google would have any vested interest in making Meets a bad experience in Firefox... No, it must be Firefox that's wrong!

I have no doubt that Google is hamstringing performance on Firefox. But that is far outside of my sphere of control so I am focusing on the things I can effect.

Another member recommended disabling hardware acceleration so that is the first thing I'll try. If you have any other recommendations on how I can reduce the impact of the issue I'd love to hear them.

Have you tried disabling hardware acceleration?

I haven't. That was recommended to me by someone else and something I am going to look into.

I would have assumed that offloading the video processing to the dedicated GPU would be a good thing, but hopefully that helps with the problem.

* * *

Firefox is increasingly unfriendly to power users. Wouldn't surprise me if they got rid of this feature someday because they have statistics showing few people use it.

Firefox is trending into the unfriendliness of Chrome and the other mainstream browsers.

That irritating and horrible; but until they follow that trend to conclusion, it's not a reason to switch at all.

Switching will accelerate this.

And rightfully so. Why maintain a feature for a small minority? Let them fork and maintain it themselves.

The danger of this is obvious.

Everyone is there for a different minority used feature. By caring only about the feature used by the majority, you are actually satisfying no one.

That’s why product managers use persona on top of metrics. Nice products have niche features and some kind of personality. You don’t want to overfocus on them but stripping them all is a losing move.

WordPerfect and Quattro Pro (now WordPerfect Suite, I think) seem to persist due catering to special needs of law firms. Catering to some niche users can keep you afloat despite an otherwise market-dominant competitor.

"WTF" is there to maintain in the feature anyways? If it's such a bloated mess that this kind of small feature causes maintenance issues and a lot of effort to include in subsequent releases, then maybe it is time for Firefox to fail.

Sigh, I've been using Firefox for almost 2 decades, and this is the first I've heard of this feature.

Firefox would have no users at all if Mozilla abandon us nerds and power users who all rely a slightly different set of Firefox's obscure features. If Mozilla were smart, they would embrace us instead of wishing we were more like normal users (if we were, we'd be using chrome already!)

You risk driving away your evangelists for one.

If you only focus on the most popular features you eventually narrow your product to one feature, so obviously there is a balance in there somewhere between focus and utility as well. Identifying why people use your product is as important as knowing what they use. Chrome does all the things I actually use from Firefox, but I use Firefox because when I ever need slightly more hackability it is there for me. That is at best, a once a year occurance.

Power users are firefox's main demographic.

I see this so much so, it's to the point that If I see you're using something else, I assume you're not a developer, and you're likely not a power user.

i do feel chrome devtools is just edges out firefox's

And then there’s tree style tabs. But actually I moved to Chrome due to how many issues I ran into with tree style tabs due to firefox not letting do its thing

Well, in case you decide to move back, give Sidebery a try. I switched a while back haven't had any issues.

I second this. I've had the very rare message saying the tab tree has gotten out of sync (always as a consequence of me moving tabs between incognito windows), but the first time it happened clicking the message refreshed the tab tree successfully; the second time it didn't but toggling the sidebar off and on fixed it. I've had no problems with stability.

And to me the context menu option to unload tabs is a killer feature.

So, if I understood you correct, you had issues with TST and instead of disabling TST, you went for Chrome?

They want a good tab manager... so they changed because the one they tried for Firefox did not work.

Over to Chrome that - as far as I have found - is worse off than Firefox in all possible ways when it comes to tab management?

Have I missed something?

It became slow and the only reason that was keeping me in Firefox (TST) started getting more and more broken so I switched. I used to be so vocal about TST back in the days that I’m probably the reason you use it btw.

I see.

I still manage to use TST, but part of my reason for using Firefox is just because I don't want to use anything Chromium based.

Oh, and also I don't really want to support Mozilla either so I am experimenting with LibreWolf as my secondary browser and so far it has been great.

Custom bookmark / search engine functionality is easy to replicate on Linux with a few shell scripts, though.

I use Brave and yet use some complex search engines such as making POST requests to APIs based on the search input and telling the browser to open a URL provided in the API's HTTP response.

Chrome would auto install site specific search in its initial beta release in September 2008. The ability to set your own keywords came soon after. https://lifehacker.com/enable-chromes-best-features-in-firef...

Chrome manages to do this without a command character. Much better UX.

Firefox without a command character searches everywhere; you use a command character to restrict your search to a specific category (history, bookmarks, open tabs etc).

Assumably Chromes does the same (ie without some prefix searches everywhere, with some prefix —or keypress— searches in a specific category). If Chrome doesn't do that, then Firefox's is the much better UX, otherwise they're equivalent.

I use vivaldi because of the tab stack feature and until firefox gets support for something close to it I just can't switch. I tried to browse the web without it but I always come back to vivaldi. I have a tab hoarding problem and it's the only browser that actually makes helps me manage it.

I use Firefox mainly because of TreeStyleTab which lets me have 1k-2k tabs with no problem. Beats all other vertical tab options I've seen so far in other browsers

I've been trying to tell people about this for over two decades, literally, https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html

Not really, Chrome-based browsers have search keywords too.

What I would like most on the Chrome-based browser I have to use at work is history (^ keywords) and bookmark searching (# tag keywords, or * bookmark keywords) using "awesomebar" operators that Firefox has.

I'd really really like it if a form of search keywords could be used for forms that don't work as GET requests.

Another great thing that only seem to exist for Firefox is Tree Style Tab [1] and a bunch of plugins around it. It completely changes the way I browse.

There is an honest but much, much more limited attempt top bring a something similar to Chromium: [2].

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

[2]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tree-style-tab/oic...

Is there a good way to hide the top tabs without getting into barely supported config files?

I like TST, but I gave up on it because I could never get the top tabs hidden correctly, and all the information I could find on the internet was different levels of out of date.

I don't think so. I use Sidebery and their recommended approach is to edit userChrome.css. It's not too bad and works well. See https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/wiki/Firefox-Styles-Snipp....

I see a sibling comment posted a link to some tab bar hiding CSS, but having gone though the same "different levels of out of date" problem myself I'll add my own solution that I'm currently using in Firefox 114 on Windows 11. Not perfectly space efficient, but avoids some issues with totally hiding the window titlebar, since I still wanted to keep the minimize/maximize/close controls up there.

Some of this may be platform specific to Windows (can't speak to window management buttons on other platforms), but hopefully it helps if anyone in this thread needs it or lands here later from search results:

  /*  Hide the tabs within TabsToolbar*/
  .toolbar-items {
      display: none;
  }
  
  /* Make the min/max/close buttons align to the right*/
  #TabsToolbar {
      display: flex;
      flex-direction: row-reverse;
  }
  
  /*  Hide the titlebar spacers, which push the buttons away from the corner */
  .titlebar-spacer {
      display: none;
  }
  
  /* Hide the sidebar header */
  #sidebar-header {
      display: none;
  }

Stupid that this sort of fiddling is required when other browsers (like Edge and Brave) are doing native sidebar tabs, but I do like how compact Firefox's can be, plus being a tree instead of a flat list.

Enabling userChrome.css files and finding where to put it is left as an exercise to the reader.

Indeed. Works for me, but I'd love it to be an about:config setting for power users, or maybe even a View menu item.

Finding the profile directory is as easy as opening about:support (also available via the Help menu).

IIRC there's also a config flag you need to set, otherwise it won't load the userchrome file. I forget the details, it's been a while since I set this up.

This thread really makes me miss old vimperator/pentadactyl.,

>a minor JavaScript performance advantage

Consider just how many layers of JavaShit webdevs want to slap down on their websites these days, that "minor" performance difference adds up. Death by a thousand cuts, basically.

This is there in chromium based browsers too, though. Settings -> search engine -> site search and then the exact same mechanism.