Making Firefox’s Location Bar More Useful

A while back I had downloaded a program that came with that wrenched VMN crap. I removed all of it from my machine but poor Firefox was still under VMN’s power. When you type something into the location bar in Firefox, if it isn’t a Firefox command or a URL Firefox sends that as a query to a search engine. VMN had set itself/Yahoo as said search engine.

To update that I typed about:config into the location bar and opened up Firefox’s config screen.

This functionality is stored in keyword.URL so use the filter field to filter out keyword.URL to pull it up. Then double click on the property to edit it and enter http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&meta=&q= for a regular Google search query or use http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&complete=1&hl=en&btnG=Search&q= if you prefer Google Suggest. Click the ok button and you are all set.

Firefox Location Bar Search Shortcuts

Another neat feature I read about on Lifehacker’s post about Ping Servers from the Firefox Address Bar allows me to create shortcuts in my location bar.

I am constantly going to PHP.net for PHP references and syntax questions. So I added a bookmark with the following parameters.

Name: PHP.net Reference (shortcut: php)
Location: http://us2.php.net/search.php?pattern=%s&show=quickref
Keyword: php
Description: PHP Reference Shortcut

Then after restarting my browser I typed php fread into my location bar and PHP.net sent me to the manual page for fread(). I usually had to type in php fread, have Google search for it, then usually the PHP.net page was the top of the queue so i had to click it and poof I was there. So now I get to skip a step!

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I added a bunch of other shortcuts that are convenient for me too, check out the next page to learn about how to figure out and set your own location bar shortcuts.

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Tagged as: about, config, fast, firefox, google, location, ninedays, PHP, ping, search, shortcut