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March 23, 2010

Lazyweb request: improving Chrome's address bar ()

by fluffy at 10:50 AM
So, a while ago I switched to Chrome, because I got sick of how unstable Firefox had gotten on all of my systems (even after a full profile purge and removing all extensions and so on). For the most part I like it a lot, and most of the niggling UI things I've gotten used to, but I still don't like how it's missing some of Firefox's awesomebar functionality.

In particular, in Firefox, you can have multiple-keyword search that spans both URLs and page titles within a history, with very tiny fragments, while in Chrome, it seems to only work if you give it the full domain name, and even then it's inconsistent.

On my site I have several backend scripts that I use regularly. The two big ones are the Movable Type publication interface and my comic buffer validation script, which in Firefox I was able to access by typing "be mt" and "be va," respectively. With Chrome, the best I've managed to get is typing "be" brings up Movable Type as the default option, but in order to get the buffer validation I try typing different things which never end up bringing it up consistently, and in the end it ends up being quicker to just type the whole URL. Obviously I could set a bookmark, but bookmarks are kind of silly nowadays.

I know Chrome supports multiple address bar search backends, but I've yet to find anything which basically just does a grep on the history sorted by access frequency. I'm also not interested in learning yet another damn API to write my own.

Any ideas?

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