Lately I’ve been using Firefox and Chrome pretty evenly; there are features and nuances with both browsers that prevent me from making an exclusive decision. Perhaps it’s normal for users to regularly use multiple browsers anymore, but I suspect it’s not. Nevertheless, that’s where I’m at and I don’t expect it to change anytime soon even though the Firefox 4 betas are looking quite nice.

One of the design decisions that I’ve grown to love in Chrome is the integration of search from within the address bar. In Firefox, there still exists the requirement for a second search box to the right of the address bar. While it is true you can search from the Firefox address bar – it actually just executes an I’m feeling lucky Google search which redirects you to the top search result for whatever your terms were. In Chrome, it will instead return a full search result from Google. The Chrome behavior is much more desirable to me and it’s highly frustrating to treat the address bar functionality as the same as you switch between browsers when they most definitely are not in this aspect.

As my luck would have it, the address bar search functionality can be customized a bit through Firefox’s about:config which is accessible via that same address bar.

The preference name we are interested in is titled keyword.URL and can be located via the Filter box under.

Double-click on the entry and look for the substring &gfns=1. To remove the I’m feeling lucky search just delete that substring leaving the full string as http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&q=

The change is applied immediately and can be shown by searching for a phrase via the Firefox address bar.