31

One of my favorite features of the Firefox AwesomeBar is that I can simply type a substring of any URL or page title in my history and it finds all matches sorted by how frequently they were accessed.

Example: I simply type "ask" when I want to ask something on stackoverflow.com., "inbox" goes to my GMail Inbox and so on because the substring matches any part of the URL or the page title.

Chrome's Omnibar is quite frustrating in this area. I am not able to predict what it's gonna fetch and I seem to have no way to train the thing to do my bidding. I have unchecked the option that says: "Use a suggestion service to help complete searches and URLs typed..." but there has been no noticeable improvement.

Any clues how I can make the Omnibar behave?

random
  • 15,201
Agnel Kurian
  • 2,275

5 Answers5

8

I've also been looking for a way to fix/augment Chrome's Omnibar which still falls short of Firefox's Awesomebar in functionality esp. in handling items from my history.

In the same line as mlsteeve's solution, I added History Search as a shortcut item. I did so by:

  • Right Clicking in the Omnibar > "Edit Search Engines"
  • Add Chrome's History handler as a search engine
  • Name: History
  • Keyword: hs
  • URL: chrome://history/#q=%s

It is not a perfect solution but it works well enough for my needs. Now you can quickly search your history by typing hs TAB in the Omnibar. The bonus is that your results are a little more detailed than in the URL bar.

Eric Kigathi
  • 648
8

The FauxBar Extension brings FireFox' Navbar behavior to Chrome/Chromium.

While unfortunately it does not replace the Omnibar, it creates an own navbar inside new tabs/windows and allows you to configure Chrome to autofocus that bar, which has that pleasant AwesomeBar feel to it.

qubodup
  • 9,394
5
  1. Enter about:flags in the omnibar
  2. Enable the option - 'Enable better omnibox history matching'
Pinal
  • 51
1

If you right click on the address bar in chrome, and click on "Edit Search engines...", you can setup rules like the ones you mentioned.

I'll use the "inbox" rule as an example. In the "Edit search engines" dialog, click "Add", For Name enter "inbox", keyword ="inbox", and URL="www.gmail.com". Now whenever you type "inbox" into the omnibar, it will take you to www.gmail.com. I'm sure you can do something similar with stackoverflow.

mlsteeves
  • 341
1

I was looking for something similar and the best thing I found so far is an extension called Fauxbar Lite (Note, there is also an extension called Fauxbar, but that's not the one I mean). It does install an extra search bar, but you can disable that and just use the history/bookmark search functionality directly from omnibar, using the keyword f (just type f SPACE <searchstring> in omnibar).

hope that helps

AtomHeartFather
  • 275