Comments on: One Interface

By: Gary Fleming

Gary Fleming — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 17:44:41 +0000

Jack: turns out that is the same set of shortcuts on Windows (and I'd wager Linux too). Cheers. I still say one bar is faster (less button presses, less target acquisition) and more consistent than two.

As an aside: I'd also bet that the majority of the people who have learned to use the search bar are comfortable with light command line usage, and would be better served treating the address bar as such.

By: Jack

Jack — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 16:51:56 +0000

I rather like the search bar in Firefox, myself. You can get to it with a quick Command K, then scroll through the engines with Command up arrow/down arrow (that's on a Mac, obviously, but there must be PC equivalents).

For some unknown reason I use the keyword search method for Google, though, and the search bar for Wikipedia, eBay, IMDB &c..

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 01:36:08 +0000

I was actually referring to the configurability of Opera (in that I’d have gotten rid of the answers.com option, and pointed ‘a [search]‘ to Amazon). But that’s surprisingly neat on the part of the Firefox folks — good to know. Cheers.

By: Gary Fleming

Gary Fleming — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 23:11:47 +0000

Steve: absolutely configurable. Like I said, just:

Search for some known value (say "UI") to get something like "http://www.google.com/search?q=ui".
Bookmark the page, then right click the bookmark and go to properties.
Replace the known value of "ui" in the query string with "%s", and add something you want to use as your search id (for Google, I use "g").

Then it should work. I believe newer versions of FF come with a few out of the box as well, like Google (using "Google [term]").

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 22:22:24 +0000

Recently, I found myself using Opera for a month or two. Initially infuriating was the address bar keyboard shortcut (F8 instead of Alt+d), but useful was the ability to type "g [search query]" into the address bar and have google return the results of that query. Similarly, "a [search]" used answers.com, and "z [search]" used amazon.com.

Presumably these strings are configurable somewhere, but it sure was nice to have something like this working out of the box.