Chrom-ifying Firefox

I’m a big fan of Mozilla’s Firefox browser for web development. It’s got a number of tools that I just couldn’t imagine doing without. ColorZilla, Web Developer Toolbar, and of course, Firebug (just to name a few).

But as time went on, I found that Firefox could be a memory hog. I had a handful of plugins installed, but not many. And no themes. But on more than one occasion, I’d see Firefox’s memory consumption start to increase dramatically.

Enter Google’s Chrome. Ironically, in spite of the name, there was very little chrome to be seen. It was a nice, lightweight browser that I eventually transitioned to for day-to-day browsing. Development continued in Firefox, but I really enjoyed Chrome as a lightweight alternative for browsing.

Last week, I made the switch from PC/Windows to a Macbook Pro (blog entry on thoughts of a PC guy making the transition to OS X to follow eventually). Unfortunately, Chrome isn’t available (yet?) for OS X. Well, back to Firefox as my “full time” browser.

It’s not a radical change, as I’d used Firefox before Chrome, but there were a couple of things about Chrome that I really liked that aren’t natively in Firefox.

Chrome has an option when pasting a URL into the address bar for “Paste and Go”. I hadn’t realized how much I’d gotten used to that until it was no longer available to me.

Luckily, there’s a Paste and Go add-on that is categorized as “experimental”, but has worked fine for me over the paste few days in Firefox 3.0.8 on OS X.

The other thing that drove me nuts pretty quickly was that Chrome allows you to type a search term into the address bar, which will automatically search Google. After typing a few search terms into Firefox’s address bar with less than stellar results, it became apparent that I’d need to do something about this.

Again, as luck would have it… relatively easy fix. Firefox is fairly easy to configure. Here are the steps to take to enable the desired behavior:

1. Type: “about:config” into the address bar (no quotes)
2. Type: “keyword.URL” into the “filter” input field (again, no quotes)
3. You should see the configuration option for this in the browser window. Double-click it, and when prompted for a new value, enter “http://www.google.com/search?q=” (you guessed it… no quotes).

Voila. Firefox’s address bar now acts like Chrome’s address bar by letting you type Google search terms into it directly.

At this point, I was pretty good to go, but there was one thing bothering me. If I am able to search Google directly via the address bar, I really don’t need the Google Search input in the toolbar. Redundancy bothers me. Redundancy bothers me. I figured I’d just turn it off, but didn’t see any means to do so.

Then I recalled that the search engine used by this input could be modified. Not only that, but cfQuickDocs.com, a site that I use frequently, has a plugin to enable the search input in Firefox to search cfQuickDocs (there’s a link to install the plugin on the prior link).

Mission accomplished. Firefox now has a “Paste and Go” option, it allows me to search Google via the address bar, and as an added bonus, when I forget the exact syntax to a ColdFusion tag or function, the docs page for that tag or function is now a single click away.

Thanks should go out to Jake Munson for his efforts on cfQuickDocs and the Firefox plugin.