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by mortehu 1957 days ago
Not GP, but I decided to try Firefox again last week, and had to give up because I couldn't navigate to intranet URLs without explicitly typing http://

Strangely foo/ works (goes to http://foo/) while foo/bar does not (instead does a web search for foo/bar).
2 comments
kelnos 1957 days ago
It's these sorts of things that make me realize that people just don't care about the health of the open web, or about protecting their privacy.

Ultimately this is a super minor issue (and turns out there's a way to fix it, per the sibling comment), but everyone just has their own pet excuse why they "can't" change to a browser that is objectively better for the web in every way.

Tragedy of the commons, I guess.

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mortehu 1957 days ago
Just to be clear, I think having to prefix my web searches is not a fix, but rather an even greater inconvenience. I'll either have to type "http://" dozens of times per day, or "g " a hundred times per day, for no discernible reason.

Aside from that I don't think Firefox is particularly good for the web. Their license is no better than that of Chromium, and Chromium has proven time and again it's a good starting point for a fork.

Mozilla employees are paid with search ad revenue, to an even greater extent (95%) than the subset of Blink developers employed by Google -- so their incentives aren't even any better.

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scaladev 1957 days ago
about:config → keyword.enabled → set to false

You'll have to prefix your searches with a key (in my case it's w for wikipedia, g for Google, and so on), but that's what I prefer personally anyway.

Also set browser.fixup.alternate.enabled to false to prevent Firefox from retrying whatever you have typed in with a .com suffix.

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