Comment by lobster_johnson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lobster_johnson | Hacker News Reader

lobster_johnson

I've been considering switching to Firefox due to these performance improvements, but the one feature that's always missing is for the location bar to autocomplete terms from other sources such as Wikipedia. Is there some add-on I can install that can fix this?

Safari is brilliant here. If you enter something in Safari's location bar, it will suggest Wikipedia and other search suggestions right away [1]. I use this feature all the time. But FF, out of the box, will only show suggestions from one source. Here [2] is what FF suggests; all the hits are from Google, and it doesn't try to be clever about showing what I might mean to search for. Notice how it offers to search Wikipedia, with this tiny, obscure icon at the bottom of the suggestions, which I find to be a completely useless feature (I have keywords for that). The top hit tends to be what Google puts in a special box in its search results.

Here is another nice thing Safari does [3] which I make use of all the time. I've not visited walmart.com, so that "Top Hit" is just because it's a popular site. I can't make FF do anything like that.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/83FfnPn.png

[2] http://i.imgur.com/T4p1NZv.png

[3] http://i.imgur.com/MkRP2Le.png

Like this? https://s13.postimg.org/l8vjukezr/Screen_Shot_2017-07-21_at_...

It's just the search box next to the location/url bar. Now has search options to start out at wiki/amazon/twitter etc.

No, not at all like that. I want the top search suggestion to be Wikipedia (or whatever else which is appropriate). I don't want to then click on an Wikipedia icon or whatever to search.

Go to Preferences > Search and set keywords for each search engine.

E.g. I use "g" for Google and "w" for Wikipedia. "g hacker news" in the AwesomeBar would then search for "hacker news" on Google and "w hacker news" likewise on Wikipedia.

I do use keyword search. Not the same thing.

That requires typing the full name of the thing.

Just another keyword search suggestion like the sibling comment, but if you use DuckDuckGo as your default search engine, they have bangs so you don't need to step up keywords yourself (!g for Google, !w for Wikipedia, etc). That's all I've ever felt the need for, when I want to search another site.

Regarding [3], are you suggesting Mozilla should sell advertising on the AwesomeBar or are you suggesting they should spy on their users to provide this feature?

What makes a URL "Top Hit"? If it is simple popularity, how do you propose Mozilla to gauge this? This problem is better punted to search engines, IMHO.

I don't know, and I don't care, I just see it as a big usability gap compared to Safari. It could use Alexa or something.

But at least it could autocomplete sites I've already visited. For example, say I've visited microsoft.com. The next time I type "micros", it could offer microsoft.com as the first autocompletion, which is what Safari does [1]. Instead you get this [2].

[1] http://i.imgur.com/JLDaquM.png

[2] http://i.imgur.com/XrjaQyf.png

See this recent (sub) thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14808645

I don't see the relevance? I am on the 55b1 and the behaviour I described is with that release. (I only use the location bar, anyway; I've hidden the search box.)

DuckDuckGo does a good job of this. So it's not exactly suggestions in your search bar, but it's damn close. Also you can configure FF to have selectable search tools including Wikipedia and Stackoverflow.

But I am specifically asking about suggestions in the search bar.

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