So you just upgraded to Firefox 4, watched yourself light up on the world map and got to work checking out the new features in your new browser. You’re working away and per your work habits, type a search term directly into the location bar of your shiny new browser. To your dismay you realize that you’re taken to a google search results page rather than the website you intended to land on.
In version 3 of Firefox, typing keywords into the browsers location bar would automagically bring you to a website via Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky feature. If you were like me, you grew to love this feature. A great example is the fact that I would constantly forget format characters for PHP’s date function. Rather than memorize the full URL to the documentation, surf to php.net and click through to the answer or even sift through a maze of bookmarks I would just use my little Firefox trick.
Mozilla in their wisdom has disabled this by default in Firefox 4 on both Mac and PC. The procedure to change it back is the same on both so here we go:
- In a new window or tab type about:config
- Click “I’ll be careful, I promise!” to bypass the scary warning (do be careful… you could break your browser)
- In the filter field, type “keyword.URL“
- Double click the entry that comes up and in the dialog box insert the following: http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=
- Click Ok and you’re done; no other steps required
Enjoy your restored search functionality!
