The blog of all and sundry

The best feature of Firefox

I may be a little late to the party, but in the last 3 months I’ve begun using this feature more and more:

Typing something in the address bar does an I’m Feeling Lucky search on Google.

Sounds simple, and perhaps not that useful all the time.  I was worried I’d get taken to wildly inaccurate sites.  Happily if the top match isn’t as close as you’d like (as defined by some secret sauce which does a great job I must say), you get taken to the Google search results instead.

I started using this feature more when I switched to Firefox 3 (thanks pesky 100% CPU and memory leaks!) and the Google Toolbar broke.  By default I map my search bar to Wikipedia given how often I use it.  Now I find it completely indispensable, and I’m at a loss when using other browsers…

The main benefit is I don’t use bookmarks at all anymore.  For example, I can just type “hacker news” and get taken to http://news.ycombinator.com/.  I can type in “download firefox 3″ and I get taken to the download page for Firefox 3.  I can only imagine this is a huge boon for those using voice recognition.  There are some other nice side effects.  Try typing a site name and a concept on that site, eg “wikipedia triops” and you don’t need to set up smart bookmarks either.  Although it’s rare for people to use the Google toolbar and a different search, it is handy now having a shortcut key to search (ctrl-L).