This is to protect user privacy as explained by a Mozilla dev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6756582

Otherwise every keystroke you made would be sent to Google.

Stuff like this is why I continue to use Firefox.

Thanks glad to see an explanation and a good one too.

Uhm it could just search when hitting enter. No need to autosuggest.

This already work. Remove the separate search bar and you are ready to go.

If you remove the bar and press Ctrl+k you are taken to google in the current tab... not cool

But why would you press Ctrl+K if you've removed the search bar?

dude! :D

You can turn autosuggest off

And you can install Omnibar or Instantfox if you want a combined address bar and search bar.

Assign keywords to different search engines.

This lets you do queries like such:

Type "g hello" into the url bar - googles "hello"

wa integral from 0 to 1 of ln(x^4)dx - can be set to wolframalpha

w France - my wikipedia one

Or just customize the UI and remove the search bar if it bothers you so much. Right-click the toolbar in <29, click the menu button and choose "Customize" on the bottom left in >=29.

If your search bar is your URL bar, then all your keystrokes (even when typing URLs) go to your search provider to provide autocomplete of search results. In Firefox you can type URLs without having them sent to a third-party. We think this is important. (You can get autocomplete search results by typing in the search bar.)

This is why it surprised me that, as I understand it, the Firefox OS homescreen search bar seems to take exactly the opposite approach: every keystroke is sent to some obscure for-profit private company in Israel. Do you know what's up with that?

You could handle this with configuration, as others have.

Edit: judging from the other comments, maybe you have already.

No, you can not.

If you don't have a separated search bar, your only options are enabling or disabling autocomplete. There is no option of using autocomplete just when you want it.

Also, the local autocomplete of the address bar is great. Count me as another one that does not want to miss it.

I was letting him slide with exactly that: an on/off switch. But with additional configuration one could use a 'g ' prefix to activate autocomplete via Google, for instance.

You can do searches directly in the URL bar and it's not exactly the same, but if you want OmniBar-like behavior there's a plugin for that (when I used it, it worked well): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/

What I like about Firefox (versus Chrome specifically) is that the AwesomeBar gives much better suggestions from your history, doing full-text searches in titles - within Chrome I can rarely find something in my history without opening the history view and seriously, most searches that I do are for things that I've already seen and it saves a lot of roundtrips to Google (hint, hint), plus searching for things you can barely remember on Google, which you end up doing in Chrome, is like searching for the metaphorical needle in a haystack.

Plus, as others said, I like it when the browser cares about my privacy. On Android on the other hand there's only a single bar due to a lack of space, but it asks you if you want to activate Google's search suggestions.

> within Chrome I can rarely find something in my history without opening the history view

Yes. And bookmarks, for me. Back when I had switched from Firefox to Chrome, I thought it hadn't imported most of my bookmarks. Chrome would hardly ever show me the things I expected/wanted.

Having switched back to Firefox, I'm delighted with the experience of it actually suggesting the things I want, again.

The only time I use Chrome these days, is for something Google can't be arsed to make work correctly in other browsers (e.g. photo editing on G+, label dropdowns in Gmail, ad nauseum).

the awesome bar might be the single biggest technical reason for me to use firefox. its fast and the search is very accurate (since its searching sites you previously visited)

You know you can remove the search bar, right?

Right click in the tab area, select "Customize" and then drag it to the available icons panel. Searching works from the address bar too.

It is also probably there still because you can select where you want to search, so you can pull down the menu and search in Twitter, or Amazon, eBay, Google translate, Google maps, The Pirate Bay, Wolfram|Alpha, YouTube, ....

Personally, my reason for preferring them separate is that I use the address bar to search my browsing history, which doesn't work if it's cluttered up with search results and prior search history.

You can add special characters to your address bar search to restrict it to only browsing history, or bookmarks, etc. There is a list of them here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-find-your-b...

For example, "^ hacker news" will only search your history, and "* hacker news" only in your bookmarks.

The perfect examples I use for this: when I'm trying to use a local hostname from my hosts file (e.g. 'devserver') and it googles it unless I type http:// in front, or when I'm trying to google an IP address and I have to go to the Google home page first.

There is, yes.

You have three somewhat simple options for the search/url thing:

1) Have a single box, do not offer search suggestions. 2) Have a single box, offer search suggestions for the stuff users type in it. 3) Have separate boxes; offer search suggestions for the stuff typed in the search box but not the stuff typed in the url box.

#2 involves sending everything the user types in the url bar to the search suggestion provider to check for suggestions

Firefox does #3, because #2 is not considered acceptable from a user privacy perspective.

There are probably more complicated options here like only offering search suggestions if the string typed so far doesn't look like a URL or something that might protect user privacy better than a straight up #2. But it gets easy to screw it up and leak private user data to the search provider....

>only offering search suggestions if the string typed so far doesn't look like a URL

How would this work? Lets say I wanted to search for Wikipedia, perhaps because I know there's news about it. How would Firefox know I was going to type "Wikipedia" and not "Wikipedia.com"?

Yes, it's things like that that make this approach complicated and failure-prone. Which is why Firefox is not doing it.

Another option is to prefix searches. If I type "google " then start offering search suggestions. Chrome even has this, and a nice UX for it. It just unfortunately also has unprefixed searching.

We can also make it bash compatible, and have all the GNU tools available at the address bar... (find www.wikipedia.com --title GNU)... But I don't think most people will be able to use it.

A few areas of impact, likely many more.

Presumed privacy - Some prefer to not send their direct traffic and history title strings through a google search input.

Usability - search engine autocomplete/suggest can interfere when typing a page title from your history.

Money - traffic volume referred to search engines is significantly increased by merging URL and search inputs.

Edit: wow, parent had zero responses when I started typing this!

Like many others I have long since removed my search box. I also use keyword search [1]. If I want to search google I write "g hacker news", if I want to search Wikipedia it's "we thing", for stackoverflow it's "so great", and so on.

[1] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches

It's admittedly a corner case, but I've searched phrases that contain URLs and have had them get treated as a URL rather than search phrase in Chrome. In that case, I just drop to google.com and issue the search from there.

I actually run into this one (or its opposite, a URL getting treated as a search) fairly frequently, which is pretty annoying every time.

ctrl-k works as "go to search box" in both browsers. For Chrome, that means focussing on the address bar and presetting it to "? ".

Nifty. That would certainly do the trick. Thanks!

If you prefix your query with a ? it will be sent to your default search provider instead.

Thanks for the tip. I was unaware. But of course, if I have to think about it, it's failed its primary function of pretending I shouldn't have to care :-P

There is. Mozilla doesn't want data from users (unknowingly) being sent across networks to a server by default.

The urlbar is already capable of searching though. It just doesn't give you suggestions for the reason above.

I have custom search plugins for work stuff that are absolute lifesavers when combined with the following addons:

Context Search (adds a context menu dropdown when you right click highlighted text; think plaintext words you search in trouble ticket type stuff) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/context-searc...

Add To Search Bar (adds an option to search-engine-ify any submit text box) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-to-search... (might as well mention https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/organize-sear...)

Bonus productivity favorite: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

So yeah, you'll pry Firefox away from my cold dead hands.

I have the omnibar add on and have Firefox (nightly actually) configured so that searches in the bar first look at bookmarks and the history. If nothing shows up there, then it searches DuckDuckGo, and if I don't see anything there, I fall back to Google.