The Most Overlook Feature in Firefox
For the past articles, I have posted a few tutorials on how to tweak and change your browser settings (IE and Firefox) to suit your preference; including creating search engine plugins (for both IE and Firefox), and hacking address bar.
In this post, I will show you how to utilize one of the best feature in Firefox that most people overlook.
In my opinion, the most overlook feature in Firefox and probably the best feature, is using Keyword in bookmark. Do you know that you can access bookmark by using keyword which you can define earlier? Let’s say, I have bookmarked http://www.byteswired.com with the keyword BW. So, instead of typing the full address on the address bar, I can simply type BW.
This feature is really fantastic because you don’t have to look browse through your bookmark list. Just enter keyword and you are ready to go. It definitely makes surfing much easier!
Let’s take a look how we can personalize our bookmarks to suit us better. I break this show tutorial into 2 categories:
Simple Bookmark with Keyword
This section will guide you how you can create a bookmark with a keyword tied to it which you can later use this keyword to browse web site.
- Open our favorite browser, Mozilla Firefox.
- Click on Bookmarks-> Organize Bookmarks menu.
- It will show all bookmarks on your PC.
- Add new bookmark.
- Enter following fields :
- Name - bookmark name
- Location - URL
- Keyword - this is the keyword that you want to use for searching via address bar. For this example, I am using BW.
- Description
- Click OK to save the bookmark.
- Now, press F6 to place focus on address bar.
- Type ‘BW’ and hit Enter.
- The address will automatically parsed as ‘http://www.byteswired.com/‘
- Alternatively, you can skip step (2) to step (5) by just pressing Ctrl + D to bookmark current page. For a list of other shortcut keys, click here.
Advance Bookmark with Keyword
This section will guide you how you can create a bookmark with a keyword tied to it. On top of that, you will also learn how to customize the location string to include search function which then you can search a web site using the predefined keyword.
- Open our favorite browser, Mozilla Firefox.
- Click on Bookmarks-> Organize Bookmarks menu.
- It will show all bookmarks on your PC.
- Add new bookmark.
- Enter following fields :
- Name - bookmark name
- Location - the search URL. For example, IMDB search url is
- http://www.imdb.com/find?q=
- append %s (search key) at the end of the string so it looks like
- Keyword - this is the keyword that you want to use for searching via address bar. For this example, I am using IMDB. So when I perform searching, I just need to type ‘IMDB <movie name>’.
- Description
- Click OK to save the bookmark.
- Now, press F6 to place focus on address bar.
- Type ‘IMDB star wars’ and hit Enter.
- The address will automatically parsed as ‘http://www.imdb.com/find?q=star+wars‘.
- Try it out yourself. You can customize lots of bookmarks to make it easier for you to search information from Internet; search movies, articles, wikipedia, quotes and others!
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