Here are the screenshots of the function in action:

You can add YouTube as a search engine to the search bar. You will notice a green plus (+) icon attached to the search engine icon when the website offers a search engine. If you click this icon then you can find an item in the drop-down menu to add YouTube Video Search to the search bar.

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-search-bar-firefox
• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-your-default-search-settings-firefox

In addition to the clickable icons, Firefox has a concept of a keyword search.

Let's say you're on the YouTube home page. You right-click the search box and choose Add a Keyword for this search. A small form pops up where you can name your search engine. Then in the lower part, you can type yt and add the bookmark.

Now, in the address bar, type yt then a space, then your search for YouTube. I'm sure you'll miss typing the tab key... but you'll have to get used to space instead.

(Of course, if you prefer to use y instead of yt, it's your call.)

I use yt for the YouTube main site and ys for YouTube Search.

Thanks to you both. I guess I have to relearn a few things, but I'm totally impressed with the speed of Firefox Quantum. It's been almost a decade since FF was my default browser, but now that I'm learning a few of these tricks, I think it can firmly sit in my taskbar from now on.

Thanks again.

Is there maybe an addon that adds the same functionality to Firefox?

Having to add every single site that has Open Search support manually to Firefox and define (and remember) a shortcut for each of them is really far away from the usability that Chrome's omnibox offers and not a real solution for this question.

With Chrome you can also just start typing the url like you would normally do and it will auto suggest the search, something Firefox can't do even with the search shortcuts.

Hi Phoenix616, you can search for Add-ons on the following page. Let us know if you find anything useful:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/extensions/

jscher2000 said

Hi Phoenix616, you can search for Add-ons on the following page. Let us know if you find anything useful: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/extensions/

Already did that and nothing turned up. Not sure if I used the wrong search terms though as "Omnibox" gets hijacked by addons that don't actually work that way and Chrome doesn't have any other term for that functionality. Also just using the "Open Search" term has similar difficulties as it just uses common English words as the name...

Hi Phoenix616, I'm not sure my search skills are any better than yours.

There is a code example for the back end of an extension to customize the address bar search behavior to use a particular site search engine:

https://github.com/mdn/webextensions-examples/tree/master/firefox-code-search

However, that example is for one site and uses predefined suggestion and result URLs. So it's only part of the story.

I don't know how easy or safe it would be to reach within the current web page and look for this tag

<link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="/path/to/file">

and then load that xml file containing the OpenSearch definition, parse out the URLs and parameters, and use those in the address bar drop-down. I haven't experimented with Chrome's feature but I assume Chrome has some boundaries on where it sends your query and loads results from (for example, a same site rule). That should be thought out, for privacy reasons at least.

Well my goal would not be to display results directly in the bar, just having the ability to directly search through every site you ever visited that has an Open Search description would be enough.

Thanks for the pointer though, maybe I just make an addon myself (never made one though...) If I really end up doing it I make sure to post it here.