I sometimes wonder if changes are made simply to make them. The way FF now tries to force us to use the URL bar to do searches seems to be one of these changes. My preference would be to be able to specify my favourite search engine as the new tab page and let me search from there, as I used to do. After all, searching and loading a site are two different things. As it is, the suggestions become a confusion of URLs and search terms. The way that the cursor is hijacked by the URL bar on Windows is especially irritating.
FF has a decent UI that works and it's one that I know. I'm at a loss to understand why some of these "features" are even proposed. Why not just add the hijack feature for those who want it but allow the rest of us to use FF the way we always have?
The trick of setting browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.improvesearch.handoffToAwesomebar to false works, really nice, but this is something that beginners and inexperienced users don't know and find unpractical or unsafe to do, that's why it's better to set them on settings page or avoid this behavior as default.
I can set the size of the text in the page search bar so I can read it without a magnifier. There is no magnification of the URL bar. An obvious ergonomic truth to those who have used Firefox for decades. But outside the common knowledge of cell phone zombie newbie programmers. Their user interface is sub-10-inch screens. So the fix for newbies by newbies is a big hurt on any who are visually impaired. So I stand by my original suggestion. If a web page has a text entry box, auto-switching to another entry box with a different fixed font size is an ergonomic dumb idea. Unless folks with less than 20 20 vision do not matter.
Stop Firefox by default entering text in the address bar from the Firefox home page
Every time I start typing something into the Firefox homepage search bar, by default it switches to entering text into the address bar. I know there are ways to stop this from happening, different in windows to Linus, but it's a particularly shoddy annoying problem which should have been sorted ages ago.
