Best Firefox Feature You Didnt Know Existed

Bookmarks are great! Personally, I particularly enjoy having these simple buttons at the top of my screen that magically bring me to the places on the internet I frequent most. But did you know that Firefox also supports another interaction, besides clicking on them?

One word: keywords! This feature is relatively hidden, as you can only access it by editing a bookmark. Upon doing so, you are presented with a modal in which, on top of changing the expected things like name, you can also set a keyword. As a tool tip, FF gives you the following:

Use a single keyword to open bookmarks directly from the address bar.

So say you bookmark a website and set its keyword as "homepage", everytime you type "homepage" in the address bar at the top, it will automatically go to the corresponding URL. That's pretty cool! As a person who prefers using his keyboard as much as possible, being able to quickly go to a website by hitting CTRL+L followed by a specific keyword is a huge deal.

I've been using keywords for most of my bookmarked sites for about a year now, and it's become my go-to way to browse. On top of this "basic usage", FF also supports URL encoding additional parameters after your keyword. From the docs:

Example: use mdn as the keyword for the URL https://developer.mozilla.org/search?q=%s; type mdn css border-radius in the address bar to test it.

This results in https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=css%20border-radius, essentially allowing you to search through specific websites with ease. I haven't used this feature a lot personally, though, as DuckDuckGo's bangs already fulfill a similar role for me. Still, it's cool that this is an option, and I can see people getting good use out of this feature.