search engine shotrcut without query
Is there a way to use "search engine shortcut" without query just to go to a website of the appropriate search-engine?
So as, for example, after writing "g" (or "g"+space) in the search bar and pressing Enter, firefox opened the url "https://www.google.com/search?q=" (or something like that).
It used to work this way in older versions of Firefox (before 83), but since then firefox just searches "g" with the default search engine. Or it "eats" the shortcut (after pressing space) and turns it into a "blue/gray search engine label" but it does not allow me to go to the search engine web without writing some query that I need to remove afterwards.
I was using this feature as a sort of bookmark shortcuts to "custom" search engine websites (I'm using tens of them for debugging purposes and often need to fill in some additional parameters to the "text" query - often even to an "empty query").
The closest I got googling was probably "browser.urlbar.update2.emptySearchBehavior" - but it either does not work already, does not do what I'm expecting or I did not come up with the correct value for it.
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In the address box, click on the magnifying glass. Check out the bottom of the window.
FredMcD said
In the address box, click on the magnifying glass. Check out the bottom of the window.
Thank you for a tip, however clicking on the magnifying glass does not seem to do anything at all.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/contextual-search Context Search by Olivier de Broqueville, Carl Scheller
Search selected text using your preferred search engines. Right-click or Alt-click on selected text to respectively launch the context menu or the icons grid. You can also perform searches using keywords in the url address bar. Requires Firefox 62+.
I gave Context Search a try as it can do things I might someday use, but it does not seem to support "empty query searches" either.
It can search "query" on "Youtube", when I write "cs yt query" in the search bar, but when I write just "cs yt" it complains about wrong usage and falls back to opening a Google homepage.
Despite the plugin itself does not work for me - it brought me to an idea how to make the search bar work the way I prefer.
Instead of using multiple "search engines with shortcuts in FF" - I could use a custom "proxy search engine script" that can parse the query with a keyword and based on simple rules just open the page I want or forward the rest of the query to a real search engine.
As a nice side-effect it will be browser independent.
Thank you for your time and help, best regards, P.
That was very good work. Well Done. Please flag your last post as Solved Problem as this can help others with similar problems. Go to that post and click the 'Solved' button to its right.
Try to set the pref to '2':
- browser.urlbar.update2.emptySearchBehavior = 2