Smarter Address Bar

Mozillians
#1

An idea about making Firefox Address bar smarter and more user friendly.

Here it goes:

The Netizens know that “r/india” means the India’s subreddit and it’s address is www.reddit.com/r/india

Imagine, that a user – instead of typing "www.reddit.com/r/india – just enters “& r/india” in the address bar and Firefox takes him/her to the subreddit where the “&” will help Firefox know that we have to do what is said above.
How handy that will be?

If Mozilla can partner up with reddit, it can have monetary benefits as well which, then, can keep the Internet more open. Same with any other site if Mozilla decides to partner up with them.

Another variant of this idea is:

We know that most of the famous sites uses “.com” and it is widely popular(albeit I admit that other domain names are trending as well)

If a user, someday, prefers to enter the URL of a page or a Website directly in the bar, he/she can just enter:

& example/hey

which will take him/her to

www.example.com/hey

The reddit specific functionality, we can say, is the above feature on steroids. It is just like the bangs introduced by DuckDuckGo but more universal and available to more users.

#2

Smart keywords are similar to what you are looking for

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address-bar

#3

Whoa! I didn’t yet know of the smart keywords and I just tried them, they are so useful!

But they are different from the idea I proposed. What’s your POV about that?

Will it help specific users or can it be used by wide number of users including non tech savvy person?

I think that in the long term, the non tech savvy users will use it eventually.

#4

I’m not sure. If there is a group of people interested in this, I feel this would fall into the add-on area, where people can test this feature earlier.

I would love to see something similar to the Test Pilot project but community driven, where people identify a need, create an add-on to test its value and potentially graduate into the product if there is enough traction :slight_smile:

#5

Yes, I was thinking of making it into an add-on first but later that idea of add-on went to the back seat but now that you have suggested, I will right away start with it.

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