One thing I’ve never understood about Firefox users is how they use Firefox’s buit-in search box. It’s a nice feature and it’s extendable, I’ll give you that, but I find there is something so much more powerful and convenient also built into Firefox that doesn’t get the credit it deserves: Quick Searches (or Smart Keywords). It’s not even mentioned on the Firefox Features page! The idea of quick searches is relatively simple. It’s a bookmark with a keyword. You use that keyword to access the bookmark. You can add parameters to your keyword in such a way that Firefox will replace a given string in the bookmark’s URL with your parameter, therefore making it a powerful GET URL shortcut.

With the recent addition of the Awesome Bar (or Smart Location Bar) since Firefox 3, the location bar has become the place where most power users will type their queries in. Why use another box to query specific search engines/sites? You can access the location bar effortlessly with F6 or with a mouse click, so why would you bother with a whole other bar for the same purposes as the main one? more…