Tell HN: Mozilla is preparing to remove bookmark keywords

by RheingoldRiver on 5/22/2025, 7:13:09 PM with 2 comments
On Bugzilla there's an active ticket [0] tracking progress to remove bookmark keywords from Firefox, in order to consolidate them into Search. I think this is going to be disastrous for my workflow and I'm very worried about it, but I don't see much discussion of this anywhere, even though I do see a lot of discussion about bookmarklets. Since bookmarklets and keywords are so tightly related (bookmarklets are the code, and they keyword is how you run it from your URL bar), I want to spread the word that this feature might be going away.

I wrote a(nother) blog post about how cool bookmark keywords are and how I use them [1] and I'd love to hear other people's use cases for keywords

[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1650874

[1] https://river.me/blog/bookmark-keywords-again/

  • by apothegm on 5/23/2025, 1:31:57 AM

    I use them constantly to, and you almost gave me a heart attack.

    Based on the plan doc, it looks like they’re not eliminating them. They’re consolidating the mechanism with custom search engines and creating a prefs UI for defining either one.

  • by solardev on 5/22/2025, 10:15:10 PM

    Ah, I use them all the time!

    In Chrome, the search engines can also just act like a bookmark (if you leave out the %s it just goes to that URL).

    Maybe Firefox can add that?

    I don't know whether Firefox searches let you use JS URLs though...