Open search in new tab without removing current search value

[doug_y94]

Hello,

I am a chrome user that migrated to Firefox because of privacy concerns. I have a simple request for you guys that Chrome already does, and hopefully it wouldn't be a very heavy lift to implement. The current experience I have in Firefox is (using Mac):
1. I open up a new tab in Firefox and enter the URL news.google.com
2. I click cmd+shift+return and the URL is opened in a new background tab
3. The current tab's URL is cleared

The proposed experience:
1. I open up a new tab in Firefox and enter the URL news.google.com
2. I click cmd+shift+return and the URL is opened in a new background tab
3. The current tab's URL still has what I had before (and leave the cursor where it is too, don't highlight the entire search field)

Use Case:

I browse reddit every morning, but I refuse to create an account. Since I won't create an account, I can't subscribe to different subreddits, and instead I manually type in the 15 different subreddit URLs that I want to see. In chrome, I could just type in "reddit.com/r/" and then the name of the different subreddit. Then, I could click cmd+return and open the tab in the background. However, chrome does not delete my search value, and I can use the "reddit.com/r/" prefix to search for my next subreddit. The experience is like:
1. I open up a new tab and type in "reddit.com/r/a"
2. Chrome autofills in "reddit.com/r/askreddit", with the "skreddit" portion highlighted as a suggestion
3. I click cmd+return and "reddit.com/r/askreddit" opens in the background, and the URL stays in the search bar, with "skreddit" remaining as the only highlighted part
4. I click backspace once to delete the highlighted "skreddit" part and once again to delete the "a", leaving me with "reddit.com/r/" in the URL
5. I type in the next letter of my next subreddit (e.g. "reddit.com/r/c") and the next history option comes in.
6. Repeat as many times as I need for my different URLs that share the same prefix

The only delta between the current and proposed experience is that after I open up a search in the background, the current experience deletes my search term, forcing me to type it all out again.

[Jon]

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