Instead of "doesn't know how to open this address" just assume search?

[Khatharr]

I commonly paste search terms (usually straight from code) into the address bar, which almost always worked as expected in FF, but in Pale Moon it's about 50/50 that I get a "I don't know how to open this address" page instead of a search. What do you think about just searching by default in those cases, or maybe just broadening the categories of things that will be searched rather than rejected?

[Moonchild]

This is why we have a search bar. Paste in your search bar if you want to search!
Searching from the address bar on single terms may or may not work, since the browser has to guess from ambiguous input if what you paste is a domain name or search term if there aren't any other indicators. If there's multiple words, it's clear you "intended to search", but for single terms this becomes really ambiguous really quickly.

[Tomaso]

This is why we have a search bar.

I agree.
Personally, I prefer the address bar to be as dumb as possible!

[Avari]

hey Khatharr, i recommend the addon "Context Search X". You select your term and after a right click you can pick your search engine from the context menu. (addon-options: set your common searches (eg google) to show directly and the rare ones in a submenu). Thats faster then copy/paste your search term in a bar. I use this all the time.





another great thing for faster searches are custom keywords

example: if you create a bookmark:

"http://www.google.com/search?q=%s"

you can set a key (e.g. "g"). And in the future you can just write "g palemoon" in your addressbar to search for "palemoon" in google. With my keywords i can use e.g. "y" for youtube-Search or "w" if i want to search wikipedia. Really fast - i couldnt live with that anymore. You can do this for any available search, just replace your search term with "%s" and set a key.





.

[Moonchild]

As an aside, you don't need an extension to use context search; that's part of Pale Moon already -- you can search for the selected text in what is chosen as your current search engine to use.

[kosamja]

Searching from the address bar on single terms may or may not work, since the browser has to guess from ambiguous input if what you paste is a domain name or search term if there aren't any other indicators. If there's multiple words, it's clear you "intended to search", but for single terms this becomes really ambiguous really quickly.

It always works with Omnibar> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/

[Moonchild]

It always works with Omnibar>

All that does is offer omnibar suggestions for addresses and using search. That has nothing to do with actually entering a word in the address bar and launching that (enter/Go). It may avoid the issue of ambiguity but it will require active use of the drop-down instead of trying to open the single-term address (which is what the OP was talking about).

[Khatharr]

hey Khatharr, i recommend the addon "Context Search X". You select your term and after a right click you can pick your search engine from the context menu.

The terms I'm searching are not coming from the browser.

[adisib]

Not sure if it is a search engine feature or a browser feature, but you can simply prefix anything you type into the url bar with ' ? ' to turn it into a search. If I want to search for "document.evaluate" Pale Moon will think it is an address. But if I type "?document.evaluate" into the url bar then it does a search on Duck Duck Go for "document.evaluate". No uncertainty weather you are searching or not, and don't have to deal with multiple bars.