Crossposted from a community manager’s post: https://reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1hwd6u7/join_mozilla_to_test_the_new_firefox_address_bar/
Hi r/firefox 👋,
The address bar is one of the most prominent areas in any browser, and Firefox is no exception. Understanding its importance, the Firefox team has been working on a set of complementary features designed to improve discoverability and security of the Firefox address bar.
With this set of features landing in Firefox Beta 135, we need your expertise to help us test these enhancements by participating in this campaign, which will be live on January 9th!
The top 5 contributors will each receive a $50 voucher to shop at Mozilla’s swag stores as a thank-you for your efforts.
Have any questions about this campaign? Join us on Matrix or comment down below!
Dear developers: stop changing the goddamn UI.
so, now, Firefox detects if you are on a page that has search capability
Didn’t Firefox have this years ago through OpenSearch and Mozilla removed it.
Moving the shortcuts at the bottom of the URL bar dropdown into a more prominent position
They’re moving always visible icons into a menu that takes an extra click. Years ago these used to be actual buttons that you could click to perform the search with that engine.
It’s like they’re bragging about their feature regressions.
This appears to be the real link, for those who despise the idea of a “url shortener” and don’t wish to route a request through bitly: https://community.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/test-the-new-firefox-address-bar/
Search Term Persistence: Providing quick access and a consistent place to perform a search.
Safari does this and I hate that other browsers don’t. The plain text of my search doesn’t get replaced with a URL, so I can easily modify it with a keyboard shortcut and some typing (rather than clicking a field on the results page). This is a good feature to add.
Fennec on android has that, so presumably firefox on android does too.
Need to test it, but sounds weird.
What happens if you open many results with middle click? Or if you use duckduck go bangs? (If you don’t know what they are, check then out. That alone makes it my default search engine)
DDG bangs are undoubtedly cool, but Firefox has that abiloty itself built-im
True, I remember using it in the past. But duck duck go works in every installation of every browser, while keeping in sync home (multiple devices, multiple browsers)/work(no Firefox allowed :()/phone it’s a pain.
After you bang you’re sent on your way as usual
Don’t care, I bang’d.
open many results with middle click?
As in, they open in a background tab? I don’t believe the url bar persists the search terms when you go to a results page, just on the results page itself
Or if you use DuckDuckGo bangs?
That one I’m not sure about. If it keeps the text across an automated redirect it would just be a matter of modifying the bang again. You’d get redirected through DuckDuckGo again, but same end result.
Unless they’re programming the bar to pull the text directly from the results page DOM in which case the bang would likely be not be a part of the search terms in the address bar once you got to the results page.
i miss when they had testpilot. :(
also i love the logo they have on that blog post i wish they made foxkeh more prominent
Am I stupid or have those (or a majority of those, could also be that the google things are missing as I disabled google) changes been in nightly for months, which has broken my custom CSS a bit?
Besides the last one, i’m pretty sure i had all of those when i was using nightly for a long time. I don’t remember seeing any breakage, though. Could be just that lepton devs are fast at updating.
Nightly itself has, apart from 3 releases, not broken for me too. But I use pretty specific CSS, where the address bar and tabs should be hidden to achieve an electron-like look, so I can use FF instead of electron, basically. Much more open, addons, less memory usage, less jank. But since a few months the address bar isn’t hidden anymore, but now faintly visible at the position it always is.
I wonder if these changes will come to Android
