How in the Tech

Clearing the Firefox search box automatically

By Adam Myers ⋅ February 16, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Firefox

Firefox changed the browsing landscape by popularizing the inclusion of a dedicated search box in the default user interface. Until then, many savvy web users had their home pages set to whichever search engine they used – yes, there were days before Google reigned supreme. With a single click of the home button you could execute a web search quickly. Firefox educated us in that the term quickly is relative. Quickly in this new sense means a CTRL+K to move the cursor to the search box and a few keystrokes to input your search terms. Subtle, but quite effective in it’s use. Nowadays, most browsers have their take on what Firefox blazed forward.

If there is one quibble about Mozilla’s implementation it would have to center around the privacy issue. Where as loading a search engine website directly, searching for your information, and moving forward with the results, the initial search terms are, generally speaking, gone. With Firefox’s dedicated search box, the terms stay there indefinitely – or until you close the browser window. It may sound silly to some, but I’ve heard users say that don’t use the search box because of that.

Clear Search is a simple Firefox add-on that doesn’t leverage a lot of common sense to deduce what it does. Once installed, Clear Search blanks the search box after each search – a perfect example of why the Firefox add-ons and extensions framework is incomparable.

Download Clear Search from Mozilla’s Add-on repository.