Firefox search bar tips & tricks

Show of hands: Who here uses Firefox’s search bar almost exclusively?

The search bar is that little search textbox on the upper right hand of the Firefox window. Just choose the search engine, type your search terms, hit enter, and the results will be displayed on your browser.

Firefox comes preloaded with Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Answers.com, Creative Commons, and I’m guessing, Wikipedia.

Add search engines. You can add items in your search bar. You’ll probably want Wikipedia & del.icio.us, but more can be found here.

Keyboard shortcut. A handy keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+K. This will automatically place the cursor on the search bar.

Removing search engines. If you want to remove some of the preloaded search engines, click on the dropdown button of the search bar, and select Manage Search Engines. Then select the search engines that you want to remove, and click the Remove button.

Open search results in a new tab. And let’s not forget Firefox’s about:config which allows your search results to open in a new tab. First, enter about:config in your address bar. Scroll down to browser.search.openintab. Then double click it to change the value to true.