Firefox Search Tweaks

I introduced the Firefox extension Open Search Fox yesterday which made it possible to add any search box on the Internet to the Firefox search box. This is perfect if you are a regular on a website that is offering a site search. I would like to use the opportunity and explain a few Firefox search tweaks that could be helpful as well.

A way to quickly search in a search engine or on a website that is offering a site search would be to add a keyword in Firefox for that website. You can set keywords by right-clicking a bookmark and selecting properties from the menu. It would for instance be possible to assign the keyword Y to Yahoo search.

Whenever you wanted to search Yahoo you would simply enter Y Searchterm into the address bar of Firefox. This would be ideal if your default search engine is a different one.

Setting your default search engine in Firefox:

To set your default search engine you have to enter about:config in the address bar and filter for the string browser.search.defaultenginename. Right-click that entry and select Modify from the menu. Enter the string that appears when the search box is not selected. The default search engines that are already included in Firefox use the same name that is displayed when selecting them.

To make Yahoo your default search engine you would write Yahoo in that box, for Amazon you would use Amazon.com

Open Search Results in a new tab in Firefox:

Firefox opens search results in the tab that is currently active by default. To change this behavior you need to edit another key. Filter for browser.search.openintab and set the value to true. This ensures that search results will be opened in a new tab from now on.