I use Fx as my main browser, but the quick search feature in Fx is miles behind Chrome's.
1. In chrome, you don't need to manually add anything; you don't need to assign a keyword that you have to memorize. All the websites that you frequent that support OpenSearch will be automatically added by Chrome and you use their domain as keyword. I can now type en + tab to search on Wikipedia, as well as hundreds of other websites (no exaggeration) without manually configuring anything.
And on top of that, if you want to manually add anything (maybe it doesn't have OpenSearch), or assign a different keyword like Fx, you can still do that in chrome://settings/searchEngines, like Firefox.
2. Chrome's quick search supports auto completion. Firefox's doesn't.
It was not a big problem for me before the change of the Search Bar in Fx, since you can very easily add OpenSearch engines there and get auto completion too. But the new "One Click" makes it very hard to use (particularly the auto completion part). Now I have straight up given up search bar.
Those two features combined end up sending keystrokes to third parties in a way that is not transparent to users, and they haven’t consented to it, either.
Fair enough, but there is no way to change to that even if I consent to send my keystrokes for auto completion.
Also, Firefox has auto completion on by default on its default search engine, which is Google no less. So I'm not sure why this topic is about privacy other than purely technical.
Firefox doesn't have auto completion on Google. Rather, there's one of two other things going on:
- Google has auto completion on Google through a bit of JavaScript.
- Firefox has auto completion on all text input fields that don't specifically disable it and aren't password fields.
As a portal to the internet, I'm quite happy that Firefox doesn't modify specific individual websites, even if they are Google (the anti tracking features are/should not be hardcoded values, but rather behavioral).
I'm talking about auto completion in search (in address bar or search bar), which by default is Google. Not talking about Google website, or any text area in webpage in general.
>I'm quite happy that Firefox..
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with that too. The one I replied to seems not happy about the behavior that you can get auto-completion results from search engines in Chrome, because that "end up sending keystrokes to third parties". I was simply pointing out Firefox did that too with default search engine, just not when you're using keyword to call other engines; which IMO implies it's purely a technical limitation, not a privacy choice.
1. In chrome, you don't need to manually add anything; you don't need to assign a keyword that you have to memorize. All the websites that you frequent that support OpenSearch will be automatically added by Chrome and you use their domain as keyword. I can now type en + tab to search on Wikipedia, as well as hundreds of other websites (no exaggeration) without manually configuring anything.
And on top of that, if you want to manually add anything (maybe it doesn't have OpenSearch), or assign a different keyword like Fx, you can still do that in chrome://settings/searchEngines, like Firefox.
2. Chrome's quick search supports auto completion. Firefox's doesn't.
It was not a big problem for me before the change of the Search Bar in Fx, since you can very easily add OpenSearch engines there and get auto completion too. But the new "One Click" makes it very hard to use (particularly the auto completion part). Now I have straight up given up search bar.