Firefox's Secret Feature

To start this off, I am by no means a Firefox preacher. I have no affiliation with the Mozilla organization, and I could really care less what browser you use. You should use the right tool for the job, and that tool would be the one allowing you to do the most work in the shortest period of time. Picking sides in religious software battles takes up more time than real programming does, so this is no essay about why everybody should switch browsers.

That said, thank god Firefox is around. I don't know of any other piece of software that has made the internet as relevant and useful as Firefox has. It is accessible to everyone and packed with loads of time saving features. The most well known feature that Firefox included is tabbed browsing.

While tabbed browsing is great, it's something a lot of people do without anyways. Most modern operating systems have a sane(r) way of window management now that may in some ways prevent the windowing nightmare we were all accustomed to before. I prefer tabs, but whatever.

The coolest and most secret feature of Firefox is search keywords. This is NOT the same as the search box.

This feature is a secret in that its likely that most current Firefox users probably don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Most Firefox propaganda doesn't mention it, as the entire concept may sound too confusing or something.

Anyways, this is what search keywords are all about. Go install Firefox and give it a shot. You will become addicted.

Step 1: Go to some search engine or website with an input box

In this example, http://www.google.com/

Step 2: Right click on the box, select Add Keyword for This Search



Step 3: In the following dialog, enter short search keyword

This will represent the search engine your query will use.



For Google, I use "g". For Wikipedia, I use "w". This makes it especially fast to type. One could use "gg" and "wp" just as easily.

Final Step: Search right in the address bar!

You're done with the setup, and can query your selected search engine by combining the selected search keyword and the query phrase:



Our example will search Google (represented by the "g" as before) for "something".

And thats it. If you do a lot of searches, this approach will save you crazy amounts of time. No longer will you have to type in URLs or use some stupid search box on the left of the window.

For those of you that don't see the value in this feature, you aren't really using the internet in such a way to allow it to actually become useful. Invest some time learning Firefox's features to see what you're missing.

Anyways, credit goes to Mr. Leo for pointing out this feature, and that products like Konqueror have had it for ages.

So go download Firefox already!