Firefox home search fake editable inconvinience
Hi, FF 89.0b2 Developer edition now contains a "fake editable" search field at the home page (the sentence contains in the class attribute so I used it here), when one start typing in it and the letters appear in the address bar.
For me personally this is partly non-intuitive partly annoying. I never met a scenario in UI of other programs, when typing in one place (where the caret is) show actual letters at another place.
Is this feature is here to stay or are there plans to to make it customizable? I used ff home page search for ages, now I installed a new tab home page extension with manually setting www.google.com in it.
Thanks
Réiteach roghnaithe
There is a preference to restore the earlier behavior -- searching in the page -- but this may be temporary:
(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button accepting the risk.
(2) In the search box in the page, type or paste handoff and pause while the list is filtered
(3) Double-click the browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.improvesearch.handoffToAwesomebar preference to switch the value from true to false
Success?
More info on about:config: Configuration Editor for Firefox.
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Please can I ask what is wrong with searching from the address bar? The address bar gives various additional options to the old way of searching, but also can be customized itself.
Standard8, thanks for your comment.
I don't mind having different but consistent ways of starting a search. But they should not be contradictory inside their internal logic. Imagine the standard google search page and while typing in the search field at the center of the page you get your typed letters appearing elsewhere. The experience will be probably frustrating, at least for some users like myself. So if the team has decided that it's no longer possible to fully mimic the search experience with the firefox home page input then it would be just better to replace the input with the static label "please use the address bar or search bar for your search" with an arrow pointing upward.
It's not a big deal though, now I switched to blank tab for new tabs and learning to get used to using the search in the toolbar instead.
Thank you for the response, there's of course a multitude of different ways of indicating it, but this was chosen as the best.
By the way, you can personalise the Firefox default new tab page and remove just the search from it (and/or other options). If you go into the Home section in preferences, you can disable the "Web Search" option under "Firefox Home Content". Of course, switching to the blank page is also fine.
I'm in agreement with previous commenter. I prefer to use the search bar in the center of the New Tab page. But, if it is no longer operational, why have it?
However, to ease the tension, make center page search bar ALSO searchable. Then, you would have all 3 methods of searching or entering an address. Keeps everyone happy!!
Réiteach Roghnaithe
There is a preference to restore the earlier behavior -- searching in the page -- but this may be temporary:
(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button accepting the risk.
(2) In the search box in the page, type or paste handoff and pause while the list is filtered
(3) Double-click the browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.improvesearch.handoffToAwesomebar preference to switch the value from true to false
Success?
More info on about:config: Configuration Editor for Firefox.