Firefox: Keyword Search is fantastic, but…
Thursday 24 February 2005 – 16:50
I’ve been using keyword searches in Firefox since it was introduced. I love it! I use it for Google, IMDB etc. There’s a problem though. If you need more than one search term, Firefox separates them with “%20″ instead of the more correct use of a plus (+) sign. This breaks some searches, for example Allmusic and Wikipedia. Today I discovered that there’s a bug entry for this in Firefox’s bug tracker and it’s called “Bug #247645: spaces should be encoded as plus signs in keyword search”. It was opened June 19 2004, so I guess it’s not high priority over at Firefox HQ. Hopefully they’ll get around to it in Firefox 1.1 or something. I could grab the code, fix this myself and the recompile the whole thing. This is definately something I would have done 7 years ago, but now I’m just too lazy. ;)
Here are the keyword searches I currently use:
g http://www.google.com/search?q=%s w http://www.webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary/?va=%s imdb http://imdb.com/find?tt=on;nm=on;mx=20;q=%s cpan http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=all&query=%s perl http://perldoc.com/cgi-bin/htsearch?words=%s
One Response to “Firefox: Keyword Search is fantastic, but…”
Why not fix it yourself? While I understand if you don’t have the time to do it, it would surely be a nice contribution to the development of Firefox, especially now when reports of trouble with Mozilla development is spreading on the net.
And BTW, really nice new blog you’ve got here :)
By xevve on Mar 10, 2005