Firefox is making it more difficult to do a search of a URL

Nov 7, 2026

Saw this on Reddit the other day and tried it on Nightly today.

The current behavior is, if you hit Command-K (as opposed to Command-L) or manually select a search engine (including the default) from the drop-down in the address bar, you can press enter after pasting or typing a URL, and it will do a search of the URL rather than navigate to its address.

With the new behavior, the only way to search a URL is to select it from search engine suggestions. (This aligns them more or less with Chrome and Safari.)

With search engine suggestions on, depending on the specifics of the URL and your search settings, the suggestion may be inconveniently located.

With search engine suggestions off, you do still get a suggestion sometimes, and maybe they’re still working on it, but whether or not you get a suggestion is currently spotty. (I like to keep search engine suggestions off.)

In Chrome, with suggestions off, you get a suggestion every time. (It also appears instantly, whereas Firefox seems slow.)

In Safari, there appears to be no way to search for a URL like `https://example.com`; you have to manually remove `https://`, which is just … insanely great.

(`site:example.com` is a search of a site, not a URL.)

A solution is to add the dedicated search item to Firefox’s toolbar, but this takes up a lot a space and, at least visually, is an absurd redundacy: