Parade, here comes the rain. I hate who I've become these days, only ever complaining about stuff, but here we go:
I find "^history search" to be actually and annoyingly useless because Firefox, like Chrome and seemingly every other browser, has unreliable, short-living browsing history. The times where I find myself trying to use the "^-search" in Firefox are always just a little bit after whatever I was searching for fell out of history retention window. The annoyance part is that my every failed attempt at using "^-search" is another reminder that browser vendors seem to want to get rid of browsing history entirely.
The rest of those tools, they work for me. Sometimes. "%tab-search" and "#title-search" seem to be negatively affected by what the article describes as "some sort of smart guess on what you type there", and overall I had them fail to find the exact tab/page I had open enough times, that I don't trust them.
"+tag search" - that's a new one for me, I didn't know it existed. I only recently discovered you can add tags to bookmarks, and those tags do complete for "unqualified" queries (i.e. just starting to type in the address bar) with some priority, and are displayed nicely.
Mine doesn't, and it's not because I deleted it or anything. My current Fx history seems to go back some unspecified time over 6 months.
Actually I started looking and found the hidden history manager view, which allowed me to at least view history as a table that can be sorted. It seems that my history goes back to 2021, which is more than I thought but much less than it should. And that's by "Most Recent Visit" column. There are two more hidden columns that can be enabled, "Added" and "Last Modified", but both have no values for any entry in history.
As for search - I picked a history entry at random (literally dragged the scroll bar 2/3 of the way down and focused on first line that caught my attention), and attempted to find it in the address bar using "^-search" with words taken directly from the page title. The entry I was looking for showed only on the third attempt, and then it took two more before it stopped disappearing when I typed in the next word from its title. This suggests some kind of slow, async background search is going on - which would explain why it never worked for me: I never expected something like this could take more than an instant, especially without any indicator saying "still searching" or whatever.
So I guess maybe it "works", it's just slow enough to be useless.
I think linking to a Firefox account will truncate your local history to the maximum retention of Firefox Sync, which is 1 year or a size limit. It's pretty lame if that is the behaviour.
I seem to get variable retentions between computers. For instance i have FF on a work laptop with sync blocked, and have purple links and history from 6+ years ago.
FF on my personal machines which have been synced at one time or another certainly don't have 6 years of history.
> I think linking to a Firefox account will truncate your local history to the maximum retention of Firefox Sync, which is 1 year or a size limit. It's pretty lame if that is the behaviour.
Uh. Yeah, that seems to track - my current history seems to back to about when I first set up Firefox Sync. If that's really the case, then... it's really lame. I don't recall it being communicated at all during Firefox account creation and activating sync, and it's exactly the kind of information I pay attention to.
In fact, the idea of enabling cloud sync being a destructive operation, silently truncating local data, is preposterous. I wouldn't have thought of it.
On chrome - Command-Y searches history. However typing in the address bar searches your history, open tabs, etc all at once. That's all I ever use. I get pretty much everywhere in 3 or 4 keystrokes.
I find "^history search" to be actually and annoyingly useless because Firefox, like Chrome and seemingly every other browser, has unreliable, short-living browsing history. The times where I find myself trying to use the "^-search" in Firefox are always just a little bit after whatever I was searching for fell out of history retention window. The annoyance part is that my every failed attempt at using "^-search" is another reminder that browser vendors seem to want to get rid of browsing history entirely.
The rest of those tools, they work for me. Sometimes. "%tab-search" and "#title-search" seem to be negatively affected by what the article describes as "some sort of smart guess on what you type there", and overall I had them fail to find the exact tab/page I had open enough times, that I don't trust them.
"+tag search" - that's a new one for me, I didn't know it existed. I only recently discovered you can add tags to bookmarks, and those tags do complete for "unqualified" queries (i.e. just starting to type in the address bar) with some priority, and are displayed nicely.