Address bars ten years ago were used to enter website addresses, and that was it. Address bars today get fancy names like awesome bar, one bar or omnibox to highlight that they provide a lot more than just the ability to enter and load urls in the browser.
For Firefox, the address bar is called awesome bar. It is the same thing which may add to user confusion. Regardless, the new functionality provided by the Firefox address bar can be really handy, especially of configured to suit individual needs.
This guide is looking at some of the tweaks available to modify the address bar behavior of the Firefox web browser. Some of you may know some or even all of the tips. I still hope that the majority reading the tutorial will learn something new that may improve their workflow or browsing experience.
Searching from the address bar
Depending on what you enter in the address bar of the Firefox browser, either a website is loaded directly or a search is performed. When you enter a website address, e.g. ghacks.net, then the page is loaded. If you only enter ghacks, a search is triggered instead.
The default search engine used for those searches is Google Search. Please note that this is because of an agreement between Mozilla and Google. Google actually pays for that privilege.
You can change the default search engine used for keyword searches. For that, you need to open the advanced configuration of Firefox. Enter about:config in the address bar and hit enter. First time users need to accept the warning on the next page, everyone else sees a list of parameters.
Filter for the term keyword.url and hit enter.
Most users will see Google listed here as the search engine. You need the search url of the search engine that you want to use for your Firefox keyword searches. Mozilla Zine offers some suggestions:
- For Scroogle, enter http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbw.cgi?Gw=
- for Bing, enter http://bing.com/results.aspx?q=
- for Ixquick, enter http://ixquick.com/do/metasearch.pl?cat=web&query=
- for Yahoo!, enter http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=
- For DDG (DuckDuckGo), enter https://duckduckgo.com/?q=
Use the following trick to add other search engines. Perform a search for TEST on the search engine, remove TEST from the url and use the resulting address.
Double-click on the parameter to change it. A box opens up that you can paste the url of your new search engine into.
Define Firefox’s suggestions feature
Firefox by default will suggest both websites from the history and the bookmarks when a keyword is entered into the browser’s address bar. This can speed up the loading of websites, as you only need to enter a few characters to get matching suggestions. Then again, it may also be embarrassing if multiple users are working on the computer and that particular version of Firefox.
Some Firefox users may want to change the default suggestions behavior. This can be done in the Firefox options. Click on the Firefox button and then on Options. Switch to the Privacy tab in the new window and locate the Location Bar entry at the bottom of the screen.
Click on the pulldown menu and select one of the available options. You can select to display only history or bookmark suggestions, both history and bookmark suggestions or no suggestions at all.
Firefox supports special characters that display specific types of suggestions to the user. They are:
- Add ^ to search for matches in your browsing history.
- Add * to search for matches in your bookmarks.
- Add + to search for matches in pages you’ve tagged.
- Add % to search for matches in your currently open tabs.
- Add ~ to search for matches in pages you’ve typed.
- Add # to search for matches in page titles.
- Add @ to search for matches in web addresses (URLs).
This is especially helpful if Firefox does not display all the results available (the display is limited to a set amount of results). Using the chars above you can limit the results further.
You can also delete particular entries by selecting them first and using Delete to remove them. This works only for History entries, not bookmark suggestions.
Change the number of suggestions
You can change the number of suggestions that the address bar displays. The default number is 12 and you can use the advanced configuration menu to increase or decrease the number.
Enter about:config in the Firefox address bar and filter for the term browser.urlbar.maxRichResults
Double-click the parameter and change the number. Users with large screens may want to increase the number of suggestions, users on low screen resolutions reduce it.
Use other search engines from the address bar
Sometimes you may want to use a different search engine for a particular search. Say you want to find something on Wikipedia. And while you could simply enter “phrase Wikipedia” in the address bar to let the default search engine display the Wikipedia entry for the term in first position of the search results, you may want to speed things up by searching on Wikipedia directly.
Firefox users can add keywords to search engines. These keywords can then be entered in front of the search term in Firefox’s address bar to search on that search engine for the entered term.
The process is easy and straightforward. Visit the website that you want to add as a keyword search. Locate the search form on the website, right-click it and select add a keyword for this search from the context menu.
A small window opens to add the search engine to the Firefox bookmarks. Make sure you enter a unique keyword in the keyword field. This is the string that you enter in front of the search term in the Firefox address bar when you want to search that particular search engine.
Use Advanced Search operators
If the search engine supports it, advanced search operators can be used directly from Firefox’s address bar. It is usually best to start with the search term and add advanced operators afterwards. Searches like “ghacks technology news” or Ghacks -linux are valid, while cache:ghacks.net linux is not (as it is confused by Firefox with an unknown protocol).
Open bookmarks with the help of keywords
Just like you can assign keywords to search engines, you can also assign them to bookmarks to open sites directly without having to enter the full web address.
Open your bookmarks library and locate the bookmark that you want to assign a keyword to. Select the bookmark and click on the More link to display the keyword form field. Enter a keyword for the website. You can from that moment on enter that keyword to load the bookmark directly in Firefox.
Add-ons to modify the Awesome Bar
Add-ons are one of the strongest selling points of the Firefox browser. Here are several popular add-ons that can tweak the way the address bar behaves.
- Oldbar – Don’t like the new awesome bar? The install oldbar to make the new address bar look and behave like that of Firefox 2.
- Simplify Awesome Bar – Use the awesome bar from anywhere.
- Hide Unvisited – Hide bookmarks from showing up in the Awesome Bar that you have not visited since the last clearing of history.
- RSS Icon in Awesomebar – Display RSS Feed icons in the awesome bar.
- Edit Middle – show results even when you edit the middle of the search query.
- Enter Selects – Pressing enter opens the first suggested result automatically.
Have additional tips that you’d like to share with everyone? Let us know in the comments.
© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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