A smarter, simpler Firefox address bar
52 points by uncenter
52 points by uncenter
Simpler? lol. I just want to see the URL. The full unedited URL. Fed up with browsers messing with it.
What finally drove me away from firefox was actually how they changed clicking on the url bar… before, if you clicked, it’d focus the bar and put the caret where you clicked. After they changed it (I think it was version 77 that broke this), the click selected all… and the caret ended up at the beginning or the end, not where i clicked. This is absolutely unbearable to me… and to make it worse, they changed double click from a useful behavior (select all) to a useless behavior (select a random part of it, i know it isn’t random but it might as well be, using a select word algorithm even though a url is not made out of normal words), which goes from unbearable to outright nonsense.
This article is right that the url bar is a key part of the browser ui. It needs to actually work.
0 Days since another browser messed up with the URL bar.
This is the second incident after Arc’s new browser, Dia.
TL;DR: No AI….. yet!
Is it just me or would it have been prudent to mention that the ebay search bar option comes with funding?
Honestly, if that’s what it takes to survive the Google funding apocalypse, I’ll take it.
Does the Amazon search option also come with funding? Is it possible to remove it? More importantly, is it possible to add my own search options? Those are the things I’d also like to see in the post.
Yes you can add your own search options and also give them an @keyword. This support.mozilla.org article on custom searches has more info.
I’m broadly OK with these changes, except maybe https trim. I feel I’m already battling Firefox to explicitly select http:// when I need to, and I’m wondering if this is going to get worse.
If you type http:// manually, you will always get HTTP. If you don’t type a protocol scheme, the browser will try HTTPS first and fall back to HTTP if the connection does not succeed. The browser will remember if a page does not support HTTPS and will not try again. (This behavior is unchanged. It’s already like that since our release from March earlier this year.)
We also do not even attempt an upgrade is an address is obviously local (e.g., IP address). If you find bugs, please report them.
Slightly tangential to this (I haven’t had this problem with Firefox except when using the HTTPS everywhere plugin, which… yeah, working as intended 😅) but I recently discovered that WhatsApp silently replaces the target of http links with https URLs… while still displaying the link text at http://. Absolutely unhinged behaviour.
this seems to be browser.urlbar.trimHttps for https trimming and browser.urlbar.scotchBonnet.enableOverride for trimming to only the search query (on ff developer 139.0b10). might wanna set browser.urlbar.untrimOnUserInteraction.featureGate to true as well
Nice to unify everything into the one field I use anyway. I use command + L to get to the address bar a few hundred times a day and I’d rather work with @history then command + shift + H and then searching the sort of retro history menu that appears. The action flow looks way better than either navigating through the nested menus in the UI or remembering F12 command + alt + I to get to dev tools.
I don’t love the “Do more from your search suggestions” but I’ll try it out with an open mind. My experience with this on other tools is they’re way too aggressive, trying to steer me towards the result with too heavy of a hand.
I’d prefer to stop with the HTTPS security theater a little bit and maybe only show me the warning if the website has a form or something? I don’t need to get warned if an HTTP website with plain text or whatever doesn’t have HTTPS. But I understand we’ve all decided this is a security issue we’re going to pretend makes a giant difference, as if scam websites cannot obtain SSL certificates.
One of the primary struggles Firefox has had since I’ve started using it is nobody knows about the more advanced features. Presenting it so that they are all available through the same UI element increases the possibility that someone will stumble upon features that are often underused by the Firefox audience.
Hm, the actions stuff actually looks kind of nice. I’m almost surprised to see something so seemingly uncontroversially useful :-) (Though I’m sure someone will take issue with it.)
And I like keeping the search term there, I’ve often been slightly annoyed with editing the url to reset it. (It seems you can find the url by hitting ESC twice.)
Not sure I’ll use @-stuff since I’m already used to *, ^ and % https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplete-firefox#w_changing-results-on-the-fly which are especially handy since you can type them after the search term, e.g. I type foo and then I think hey I just want search completions so I type ?
I hope I can turn off the https trim. I get that it makes sense for most non-technical users, but I want to see that
I’m not sure what being technical has to do with it. If there is no protocol visible, it means it’s HTTPS. If you do see http:// and “Not secure”, well then it’s HTTP.
Personally I have some custom browser CSS to highlight the HTTP case even more (flashing red “Not secure” badge). (Although I just realised it’s no longer working, maybe because of this update.)
fair. maybe I’m just old. None the less I hope there’s some about:config thing I can flip
The address bar should display the address of the page. On the web, an address is a URL. URLs start with a scheme, so the address bar should display the scheme.
Not displaying the scheme is user-hostile.
Mozilla has done several questionable things, but this ain’t it. It’s not user-hostile, you have access to precisely the same information as before, there’s nothing ambiguous with the new displays. Copying the address also includes the scheme so you’re not losing anything if pasting it elsewhere.
You’d have a point if they hid both HTTPS and HTTP schemes, because then it’d be ambiguous and you’d have no easy way to tell if you’re on HTTPS or not.
(And as mentioned elsewhere, you can still enable showing the scheme even on HTTPS by setting an option.)
Is Mozilla being user-hostile by not showing what port you’re connecting to in the address bar if it’s 80 or 443?
Who asked for this? Sometimes I feel like the disconnect between Mozilla and its users is growing bigger every day.
I still feel that there are two half features for searching in Firefox.
Search Shortcuts are definitely the prominent one. But they are per-device. On every new device you are back to defaults (because the defaults are paid? I hope not). You can also pick one of these as your default search engine when you enter something that isn’t convincingly enough a URL into the awesomebar.
Then there are keyword bookmarks which can be used for searching (just put a %s in the bookmark URL) which I use most often (except for the default engine which I need to configure manually on every browser) but don’t sync across devices.
It seems like these features should really be friends. Keyword bookmarks are more powerful as they can be just plain keywords or search bookmarks, but they don’t sync and can’t be the default. I imagine the basic Search Shortcuts could be migrated to bookmarks and everyone would be happy? (Just need to add some way to store which engine is the default.) Or add syncing to Search Shortcuts and I’ll start using that. (But please keep keyword bookmarks at least for non-search keywords)
Personally I customise my firefox to have the good old search box separate from the URL box, like it used to be way back before they were merged. Looks like some of these changes are an attempt to bring back search-box functionality (e.g. keeping the search term. or the dropdown to choose search engine), but being unified with the URL box there’s a tradeoff.
Not sure they can claim it’s simpler to need to know context of what’s the displayed content, and advance commands for quick-actions or @ for searching. I’m not against advanced option and powerful tools, but simple it is not.
I do the same with the dedicated search box, and it’s why I really wish the address bar were (or could be configured to be) just an address bar. When I want to search I use the search box, and when I enter text in the address bar (which might sometimes be a non-FQDN hostname on my local network) I want it to be interpreted as an address, not heuristically reinterpreted as a query and sent to a search engine.
I’m sure some people will like it, but for me it’s just another complication, another straw on the camel, making firefox slightly bigger, slower, and slightly more buggy :(
My primary use case of unified url/search link is fixing typos in urls i type, and if I was a better typist, I’d just disable it. On the one hand not worrying about typos is great, on the other the browser can send my url to a search engine whenever it feels like it.