Make Chrome's Omnibar behave more like the Firefox AwesomeBar

One of my favorite features of the Firefox AwesomeBar is that I can simply type a substring of any URL or page title in my history and it finds all matches sorted by how frequently they were accessed.

Example: I simply type "ask" when I want to ask something on stackoverflow.com., "inbox" goes to my GMail Inbox and so on because the substring matches any part of the URL or the page title.

Chrome's Omnibar is quite frustrating in this area. I am not able to predict what it's gonna fetch and I seem to have no way to train the thing to do my bidding. I have unchecked the option that says: "Use a suggestion service to help complete searches and URLs typed..." but there has been no noticeable improvement.

Any clues how I can make the Omnibar behave?

Agnel Kurian

Posted 2010-03-17T06:49:02.697

Reputation: 2 197

Unfortunately that's just how the Omnibar works--you can't (at this moment) change it. If you're that unhappy about it, why not use Firefox? :) – Sasha Chedygov – 2010-09-30T05:12:52.560

2@musicfreak I'm trying to switch to Chrome because of FF's recent CPU/memory binges - and the fact that an errant script in one tab freezes the whole browser. But I've become so dependent on the FF's bar's behavior that I don't know if I can stick it out. – aptwebapps – 2011-04-29T03:10:54.870

@aptwebapps: Fair enough, I guess, although I bit the bullet and just went with Firefox. I used Chrome for a few months, but I just kept thinking about how much I miss the way Firefox does certain things (especially extensions). For me, it's worth the occasional freeze-ups, but it's your call of course. You can never have everything you want, it seems. :) – Sasha Chedygov – 2011-05-02T05:36:19.780

And I love the profiles feature of Firefox. Chrome has something similar as well but it's not that well documented. Same goes with Opera. With FF, I can operate both Peter Parker and Spiderman accounts simultaneously. – Agnel Kurian – 2011-05-02T17:41:06.213

@Agnel your ISP still will be able to connect your identities. – kinokijuf – 2012-07-20T08:30:20.547

@kinokijuf, Yes, you are right. But it is still a great feature that Chrome and others lack. – Agnel Kurian – 2012-07-20T11:35:26.393

Answers

I've also been looking for a way to fix/augment Chrome's Omnibar which still falls short of Firefox's Awesomebar in functionality esp. in handling items from my history.

In the same line as mlsteeve's solution, I added History Search as a shortcut item. I did so by:

Right Clicking in the Omnibar > "Edit Search Engines"
Add Chrome's History handler as a search engine
Name: History
Keyword: hs
URL: chrome://history/#q=%s

It is not a perfect solution but it works well enough for my needs. Now you can quickly search your history by typing hs TAB in the Omnibar. The bonus is that your results are a little more detailed than in the URL bar.

Eric Kigathi

Posted 2010-03-17T06:49:02.697

Reputation: 249

6Adding a history search does not even do the trick. I've visited play.google.com/apps/publish/Home many, many times, but typing 'h publish' does NOT suggest it. OmniBar requires me to start the url from the beginning, play.goog... That's not the part I remember. FireFox AwesomeBar owns. Complete FAIL, Google. – Jeff Ward – 2012-04-27T13:58:48.197

The FauxBar Extension brings FireFox' Navbar behavior to Chrome/Chromium.

While unfortunately it does not replace the Omnibar, it creates an own navbar inside new tabs/windows and allows you to configure Chrome to autofocus that bar, which has that pleasant AwesomeBar feel to it.

qubodup

Posted 2010-03-17T06:49:02.697

Reputation: 3 736

Enter about:flags in the omnibar
Enable the option - 'Enable better omnibox history matching'

Pinal

Posted 2010-03-17T06:49:02.697

Reputation: 51

1this no longer exists AFAIK – Scott Schulthess – 2016-12-02T16:53:29.213

3Seems to have been removed :( – Decko – 2011-07-18T19:06:59.857

1Is it "Aggressive history URL scoring" now? – Nicolas Raoul – 2012-04-06T08:47:04.510

1Now it's called "Inline HistoryQuickProvider suggestions" (see Fabian Zeindl's answer) – Dmitry Pashkevich – 2013-01-18T15:12:49.147

If you right click on the address bar in chrome, and click on "Edit Search engines...", you can setup rules like the ones you mentioned.

I'll use the "inbox" rule as an example. In the "Edit search engines" dialog, click "Add", For Name enter "inbox", keyword ="inbox", and URL="www.gmail.com". Now whenever you type "inbox" into the omnibar, it will take you to www.gmail.com. I'm sure you can do something similar with stackoverflow.

mlsteeves

Posted 2010-03-17T06:49:02.697

Reputation: 321

2This is just a workaround though--it doesn't really solve the underlying problem. The OP wants to be able to find any page in his history that has the typed text in its title. – Sasha Chedygov – 2010-09-30T05:35:21.057

@musicfreak agreed, but I like it that way better because I explicitly say, "when I type inbox into the omnibar, take me to my gmail inbox". Whereas if it just guesses based on my history, that might be confusing. Trying to search for something, and it goes to a page that you've been to before.

I noticed (with dev of chrome) that when you type "inbox" into the omnibar now, the "suggestions" will be a google search first, and then it will display items from your history that match. Its another couple of keystrokes. – mlsteeves – 2010-09-30T16:30:54.773

1Fair enough, but I guess those are two different goals. For example, I personally like to have the ability to go easily search for any arbitrary recently visited page from the URL bar. Your method would not work for this. But for pages that you visit often, I completely agree with you, and your method would work wonders (though I'd just use bookmarks in that case, personally). – Sasha Chedygov – 2010-09-30T20:00:24.527

I was looking for something similar and the best thing I found so far is an extension called Fauxbar Lite (Note, there is also an extension called Fauxbar, but that's not the one I mean). It does install an extra search bar, but you can disable that and just use the history/bookmark search functionality directly from omnibar, using the keyword f (just type f SPACE <searchstring> in omnibar).

hope that helps

AtomHeartFather

Posted 2010-03-17T06:49:02.697

Reputation: 236