Firefox 101 - #2 - The Firefox Address, Search and Bookmarks Bars

Welcome back to Firefox 101.

Now that you’ve installed Firefox, you want to get used to what is called the Smart Location Bar. The Smart Location Bar which is also sometime of referred to as the address bar is where you’ll type in the URL of the website you want to visit. For example, if I want to go to the Google Homepage, I type in Google.com here into the Smart Location Bar.

Now the reason it’s so Smart is because besides understanding what you’re typing in here, it will also starts suggesting websites you’ve saved in your bookmarks or that you frequent a lot that match what you’re typing. So since I frequent Google a lot, I can just type a G and it comes up. Let’s try that again. I have YouTube bookmarked so I can just type in a Y and YouTube comes up.

Besides the location bar, you’ll also notice this search box. This allows you to perform web searches without having to visit sites like Google or Yahoo. You can add more search engines like Amazon or eBay by clicking on Manage Search Engines and clicking on Get More Search Engines. You can then rearrange them by selecting them and clicking on move up or down.

You can also easily remove them. If you check the box Show Search Suggestions then when you’re typing in the search box, terms that match what you’re searching for will be suggested to you to help you search quicker.

You’ll also see three buttons in your Bookmarks toolbar. This is called a Bookmarks Toolbar because you can add sites you’ve visit frequently to the toolbar. Right now there’s a button from my most visited sites.

You can click this button to visit a health page for Firefox and then there’s also a button that shows you the latest news stories online. You can remove any of these buttons by write mouse clicking and then selecting Delete.

Remember, there are 10 parts to this series so don’t forget to check out the other episodes in the Firefox 101 Series.