Sometimes, I feel like the technological world has passed me by. I had that feeling this weekend when I stumbled onto something that I’m sure that everyone else but me knows.
Two things form the basis for this post.
- I really like the Omnibar in the Google Chrome browser. It lets me type URLs and search in the same box;
- I’ve been a real advocate for changing the default search engine to Diigo instead of Google or Bing or Yahoo! or whatever so that results come from curated results instead of the crapshoot that blindly searching can provide.
So, I was playing around with Firefox 5 Beta Channel (although I read that there’s a Firefox 6 Alpha out…) and forgot that I was in Firefox for a second. I thought I was in Chrome and typed in a search term. Guess what? I got Google search results. I sort of stared at the screen for a second and shook my head. I tried it again. Son of a gun, it worked again.
I then thought – this is very cool. Even when I switch my default search engine to Diigo, there are times when I really need to use Google to do a search. Similarly, if I switch the default to Google, I’m back to wading through results until I get what I want. Firefox, as you know, has a search window – why don’t I use that for Diigo searches and the Awesome Bar for searching my history and searching using Google?


