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Chrome offers this quiet magical feature called ‘tab to search’, Firefox allows you to make custom search key shortcuts but you need to make each of them. It’s
by evolve2k 6y ago
Chrome offers this quiet magical feature called ‘tab to search’, Firefox allows you to make custom search key shortcuts but you need to make each of them. It’s just not as easy to use and is a killer feature that’s very fast/useful and missed for anyone who uses it and tries to switch away to Firefox.
It’s the only thing that keeps pulling me back to Chrome, as well as many others I’ve seen discuss it in forums over the years.
There’s no Firefox extension to add it and as Firefox users don’t have it they don’t miss it.
Really, sort this, you’ll quietly unlock a bunch more switches.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1177556 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1177556
- ric2b 6y agoI just have duckduckgo as my default search engine, that way I can use the bangs to search almost any site that's even remotely mainstream by starting my search with !w (wikipedia), !y (youtube) !hn (hacker news), !g (google), etc.
- WorldMaker 6y agoThere is related functionality built-in to Firefox (since basically forever) you can assign keywords to any installed search provider and then search that specific search engine by prefixing your search with the keyword you assigned. So you could assign !g directly in Firefox options and Firefox will take you directly to Google for that search (no need for the intermediate duckduckgo). You can add things like YouTube etc as well so long as they have "OpenSearch" metadata. (Presumably what Chrome is using for "tab to search"?) [1] [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-engine-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-en...
- heavyset_go 6y agoFirefox is getting rid of, or has already got rid off, OpenSearch integrations[1]. What you're describing is a bookmark substitution search feature that's independent of OpenSearch, and Mozilla calls the feature keyword searches[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch#Support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch#Support [2] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches
- WorldMaker 6y agoMy understanding is that Firefox still uses the OpenSearch metadata shallowly as the easiest way to create the "keyword search bookmarks" rather than writing a bookmark by hand (though your second link was what I was looking for on how to do that and it seems quite easy/convenient to do yourself if you had to). I don't believe that shallow auto-bookmark discovery is/will be dropped, they dropped a more complicated add-on/extension-based approach that supported more OpenSearch features.
- heavyset_go 6y agoThanks for taking the time to explain the change, it looks like you're correct.