The 'Back' Button the Most Clicked Firefox Icon 267
darthcamaro writes "How many times did you click the 'Back' button in your browser last week? According to a new study from Mozilla, it's likely that you clicked 'Back' a whole lot. 'Across Windows, Mac and Linux 93.1 percent of users clicked the button at least once over the course of a five-day period. In total the study reported that users clicked on the back button 66 times over the course of five days. The next most used button is the 'Reload' button with 73.2 percent usage and 22 clicks on average per user over five days. Other areas of the main window that were heavily used include the Search Bar where users input search queries. The study found that 67.9 percent of users used the Search Bar for an average of nearly 16 clicks per user over the course of five days.'"
Why it was made big (Score:5, Informative)
Old news. This is why they made it bigger in 3.0.
Re:Why it was made big (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why it was made big (Score:5, Informative)
Sometimes links won't open in a new tab because they're implemented with some Flash and/or Javascript fuckery. When this happens, I just regular-click on the link and then middle-click on the 'back' button - thereby opening up the previous page in a new tab instead.
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I didn't know that, spazdor. Thanks. That's a good one.
Re:Why it was made big (Score:5, Interesting)
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Would have been a tough one, was it informative for the tip, or was it insightful because of the use of fuckery or just plain underrated?
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Re:Why it was made big (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but oftentimes with the flash quackery, the back button doesn't work anyways.
Breaking the back button is one of the most serious design mistakes a webmaster can make. Since, as we can see from just these observations about FF, the back button is one of the most frequently used functions by a large majority of surfers.
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I just press backspace, doesn't that do the same??
Re:Why it was made big (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate Back taking ages cos it's reloading the screen. It's in memory - just show what you showed last time. I don't care that it might have changed. No, I don't want you to resend the message - just show me the bloody page you showed me just seconds ago before I accidentally clicked/changed my mind.
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There's a fix for that. (Score:2)
If a web page uses "nostore" for a value in the HTTP Cache header, then Firefox won't store it for the back button. Unfortunately, PHP sends the nostore value by default when the page runs "session_start()", so lots of pages end up fucked up like you say.
The solution I have found is to run sed on libxul.so. Replace every instance of "nostore" with some random alphabetic garbage of the same length. This causes Firefox to only fuck the page if it finds that exact same random garbage in the cache string, which
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I rarely us the back button either.
All links get opened in tabs, so my tab bar becomes a readily-accessible history trail all immediately visible at any time. Using 'click'+'back' feels too much like wandering along a dark tunnel.
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Nor me. I use the right-click to open a menu and select back
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But what's really interesting... (Score:2)
Now, I'm no statistician, but that seems to indicate that there are (66/93.1% =) 70.9 people who use Firefox. Probably less, since some users would have clicked more than once.
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Erm, that's an average of 66 clicks per user I'd imagine.
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> Erm, that's an average of 66 clicks per user I'd imagine.
He's no statistician.
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Since the study was made with a Firefox plugin, I think you'll find that 100% of the Windows, Mac and Linux users in the study use Firefox.
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And why Microsoft decided to make the thumb buttons on their mice act like "back" and "forward" by default
Now if only that could be disabled... I love my big ol' sidewinder, but those huge honking buttons that are so useful when I'm killing things in Cantha turn into a HUGE liability when I'm browsing the web and they tap against the edge of my keyboard. =\
I really hate that...
Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
it's the most used gesture: Right button down, drag left.
Re:Or... or... or... or... (Score:2)
Is that in FireFox by default? It doesn't seem to do anything on this machine (Win/FF3.6.6).
I know I can add it by using e.g. http://www.mousegestures.org/ [mousegestures.org] , but do add-ons count?
A sibling poster already mentioned the alt+left arrow.. I wonder how many ways there actually are...
1. Back button
2. Alt+Left Arrow
3. menubar: History - Back (and thus: Alt+s, B)
4. Right-click (context menu) on any blank area of a page - Back (and thus: Right-click, B)
5. Backspace button (maybe Win only?)
6. Shift+Mousewheel Down
Ca
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And this is why I don't bother with "shortcuts". I would waste more time trying to memorize all those different buttons, commands, gestures than if I just clicked on the back button, or used the dropdown menu.
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I suppose that would make #7 - an application or driver sending a 'back' command directly to the browser (no idea if that's still DDE or somesuch).
Although it's also possible that the mouse driver simply fakes keystrokes (such as the Backspace key) when that button is pressed.. in which case, I'm not sure that would count as a different FireFox method so much as an input device method.
( my laptop has a little 4-way direction button that can be configured to have left = Back as well )
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What is this "flash" you speak of? Do you not have this installed: http://clicktoflash.com/ [clicktoflash.com]
(OK, obviously even with this, you can purposely load/whitelist specific Flash items..)
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Uh, you could just press backspace...
IE (Score:4, Funny)
For Internet Explorer, Ctrl+Alt+Delete is tops
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Windows
U
U
Re:IE (Score:5, Funny)
"For Internet Explorer, Ctrl+Alt+Delete is tops"
That is almost as bad as setting my Hunter's Feign Death hotkey in Warcraft to Alt-F4...and not testing it until the 4th boss fight in Black Temple.
How many buttons are there? (Score:2)
There aren't that many buttons to click on anyway.
I didn't click any ... (Score:5, Funny)
Zero Times (Score:5, Funny)
Zero times, I use vimperator.
I don't need to move my hands from the keyboard like some ape.
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I do it gamer/modeler style. One hand on mouse, one hand on keyboard.
Backspace is my back button of choice (I tend to mouse left-handed when I do stuff like surf)
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I get the joke, but the reason I do it: it helps keep my RSI under control.
If I were to use a mouse and keyboard all day at work, and then do the same at home, I'd be in a load of pain after a day or two.
Going left-handed at work and right-handed at home seems to keep it under control. It's also helped my left-hand coordination. I was fairly ambidextrous before, but at this point the only thing I can't do well is write. That's less a matter of handedness and more of practice (I never even try) and writing-d
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Good, you can be used to round up others of your kind when I wish to cook and eat your men or mate with your women.
Self-contradictory? (Score:2, Insightful)
"Now that we know how users are using FF3, we can figure out how to pessimize FF4's UI. It'll look like Office's Ribbon, or Chrome, or Opera, but whatever it is, it won't look or feel anything like FF3. But it'll look good on o
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You say they are contradicting themselves, but so are you. First you complain about how the UI will get worse because they are just following trends without considering usability, and then you admit that you just don't want Firefox to change.
Re:Self-contradictory? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. I know better than anyone else what I find useable. A good UI should have sane defaults and be customizable to what I need. Once I configure it properly, it should not change. UI designers should focus on giving us as many options as possible, and setting them to sane defaults.
In any case, horribly broken defaults that can be customized to something I like is far, far better than moderately acceptable defaults that cannot be customized at all.
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Because it's in the upper-left? (Score:5, Interesting)
I informally studied the habits of websurfers at my websites with Google Analytics. I found that for almost every page, the most clicked link was whatever I put at the top left.
My hypothesis was that our eyes were just drawn to any graphic at the top left, no matter what it was, and so we'd click on it.
I'd be interested to see some behavioral UI studies about this.
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I informally studied the habits of websurfers at my websites with Google Analytics. I found that for almost every page, the most clicked link was whatever I put at the top left.
My hypothesis was that our eyes were just drawn to any graphic at the top left, no matter what it was, and so we'd click on it.
Alternate hypothesis: all those people were trying to click the back button, but missed.
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Alternate-alternate hypothesis: people who clicked the back button were actually trying to click the top-left of the webpage.
Or maybe there's a bit of both going on there, the two are hardly mutually exclusive.
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There are some studies about what people actually SEE on web pages at http://www.useit.com/ [useit.com]
Don't let the site's plainness and 1996 colours put you off, it's got a LOT of good info.
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I think you have the causation backwards. They put the most useful button in the upper left because that's where it's easier to find it.
Re:Because it's in the upper-left? (Score:5, Informative)
My hypothesis was that our eyes were just drawn to any graphic at the top left, no matter what it was, and so we'd click on it.
I have a Google Adwords block on my personal website. Up until a month ago, the ad had been on the top right corner of the screen. I was playing around and moved it to the top left.
From January 1 to June 1, I had x hits, y clicks, and made $z in ad income.
From June 1 to July 1, I had almost exactly x/5 hits; I served 1.03 times more hits during that month than I had per average in the last five months. I also had .54*y clicks that month, or 2.71 times as many clicks per average month. Finally, I earned 1.42*$z last month, or 7.11 times per month as much as during the first five months. Of the top 20 highest-earning days in the last 5 years, 6 were in the last month.
Let me repeat that: changing almost nothing but the ad placement from top-right to top-left increased my click-through rate 171% and my monthly ad income by 611%, on almost the exact same number of hits.
Yeah, I'd have to agree with you.
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When your deep inside the bowels of a website and want to return to the home page - guess where you typically click - yep, the logo at the location of the defacto standard home page location
You are sacrificing your own customers for money - it's up to you if it's worth it or not.
Good point, except that you're wrong. The customary top-left "home logo" is still there. I just moved the navigation sidebar (with the ad at the top) from the right side of the page to the left.
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Glad to know I'm not the only one; it took my 30 minutes to figure out how to print in Office 2007.
(I should have just Googled it.)
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The problem there is that it doesn't look like a button, just gaudy decoration.
Two types of users (Score:5, Interesting)
Read once in a web usability design book that there are two types of users: The ones who are search oriented and the ones that are navigation oriented. Search oriented users use a search engine instead of the browsers navigation bar and the browsers back and forward buttons instead of the web site navigation and links. Navigation oriented users use the browsers navigation bar and the web sites navigation links.
Of course that's an oversimplification but if that's even remotely true (which I don't know if it is) the high frequency of back button use indicates that there are a lot of search oriented users out there. And if that's the case most web sites are designed poorly or plainly wrong from their usability perspective. What I mean is that in-site navigation is a heavy part of most web sites when it really shouldn't be. Instead web design should promote the use of in-site search and back button use.
A friend of mine is a "search oriented" user... (Score:2)
Frankly, I never understood his reasoning. Anyway, he *ONLY* enters URLS into Google's text box. When I tried to explain to him that there's a much easier way of doing things, he flat out refused to even consider it.
But then, he's an old curmudgeon set in his ways, just as I'm set in my own curmudgeonly ways.
I hope this doesn't guide programming decisions (Score:2)
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Screen real estate is valuable, and knowing how often buttons are used tells you which ones to make easily accessible and which ones can be buried.
When it comes to UI's, "most clicked" should absolutely be equated to "most valuable". Doing otherwise could result in a horrid design where the simplest tasks require very convoluted and excessive steps.
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Often people click Back multiple times to get where they want. If we could invent a "Go Back to where I wanted to be" button that the user clicked only once, this would be more useful but receive fewer clicks.
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Often people click Back multiple times to get where they want. If we could invent a "Go Back to where I wanted to be" button that the user clicked only once, this would be more useful but receive fewer clicks.
Agreed. But having to click Back multiple times is precisely the reason why it needs to be so easily accessible.
And if your hypothetical button is not the "most clicked" button on the UI, then it should be demoted to provide the new "most clicked" button with the most screen area. "Most valuable" in terms of UI design does not equate to "most functionality". It means "the button people use the most often". Buttons that are clicked once every 6 months can be buried in a series of menus because people will pu
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I hope programmers don't equate "most clicked" with "more valuable" or "more useful." In my view this is a useless statistic.
Then thank god you aren't a UI designer.
These are the *precisely* kinds of metrics one wants when optimizing a user interface, as "most clicked" *absolutely* equates to "most valuable", in the sense that it's the most frequently used feature, and therefore invoking that feature should be made as easy as possible.
Context menu (Score:2)
Re:Context menu (Score:5, Interesting)
Likewise...
Except when the entire visible area is an image, in which case there IS no "back" on the context menu, thanks to a moronic decision back when Mozilla was new, and that persists today across the entire Moz-based family.
Seems the lead programmer thought there was too much "clutter" on the context menu, so removed "back" when the pointer was over an image. There was a huge outcry in the MozDev newsgroup, and a vote of 701 to 2 (yes, real numbers) to restore it, but his response was essentially "*I* like it this way, so fuck you. Moz isn't meant for end users anyway." (I witnessed this exchange in the newsgroup myself.)
Someone made a patch to address the deficiency, but it was not widely distributed and seems lost to history. Perhaps someone will see fit to recreate it, for those of us who curse this decision on a daily basis (but not being coders, have no way to fix it).
It's simply because of bad design (Score:2)
The keyboard shortcut for reload is F5, which you hit with the left hand, but the keyboard shortcut for back is backspace (or some combination of keys involving an arrow) which is hit with at least the right hand, if not both. If you're mousing (which is handy for web browsing) then you don't want to have to take your hand off the mouse all the time. Likewise, the back button is near the upper-left corner of the window so it's easy to find.
Huh (Score:3, Funny)
I would have thought Slashdot's 'submit' button would have been the one most clicked in Firefox.
Zero. (Score:2)
In Opera, it's right button down, left button click to go back, left button down, right click to go forward. Always.
It's the same in Firefox, until Firefox gets updated and the gestures plugin is broken for a few weeks until the maintainers fix it for the new firefox version.
Going to IE is a nightmare. Then it's right click, click Back on the right-click menu.
Once you get used to mouse gestures, you wonder why anyone would ever waste so much mouse mileage going up to the Back button all the time.
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So... why do you use extensions to add your much loved feature if Firefox, but deride IE as though it doesn't offer the same functionality through its own add-ons? I'll grant that the library is smaller, but they exist, there's a centralized location to get them from (open the Add-on manager and click "Get more toolbars and extensions" or just navigate to http://www.ieaddons.com/en/ [ieaddons.com] ), and they seem to provide most if not all of the generally sought-after features. I have ad blocking, mouse gestures, user-a
clearly! (Score:2)
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This thread surprises me (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you all just use the 3-button mouse that came with your Dell? Back and forward buttons have been common on mice for the last decade. Why click a toolbar button when you can just use your thumb?
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My use a mouse when you can use the keyboard?
Vimperator FTW!
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(Note to self: Find the guy who invented tear-off tabs and tear his tab off. I clicked on the damn tab and moved the mouse down so I could highlight some text, and the fucking thing popped open a new goddamn window. WTF? Fuck mouse gestures.)
let's instead find the guy who decided to implement tear-off tabs without a checkbox to disable them, and check his box until he's disabled.
and in other news (Score:3, Insightful)
the F2 key is the most used key in Solitaire
Am I the only person (Score:2)
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I am a bit surprised there are so few mouse gesture responses, though. It's one of my first add-ons when I do a clean Firefox install.
No wonder it's most clicked (Score:2)
You have to because some freaking idiot made it a unified/menu-like like IE.
So instead of a single click and you're done, it's now, click, menu, choose/click the fwd/back,
go wrong direction (possibly) or too far, click the unified button again (repeat).
A FWD (with menu and clear direction/levels) and BKWD with the same menu and CLEAR direction.
I HATE the way IE does it (can't seem to fix) and it's the first thing I fixed in FF3.
That's because ... (Score:3, Funny)
Back button? (Score:2)
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I swear I clicked the reply link at the top before noticing your post..
Sounds handy so I'll have to look it up; I only have scrolling on my touch pad.
Back "button"? (Score:2)
Interesting; I usually use 'ALT+Left', but also use 'F5' and 'CTRL+L Tab' pretty often..
Mouse "Thumb" button? (Score:2)
Seriously, now I'm so used to that, that if I'm using the laptop touchpad or my 10 yr old trackball, it actually takes me a minute to remember how to go "back" without that button...
In fact, I can't think of a single UI button
Re:Uhhhh (Score:5, Informative)
Just using Mozilla Test Piliot [mozillalabs.com] add-on.
Re:Uhhhh (Score:5, Informative)
How exactly could you know the answer to your query? Well by RTFA of course!
Re:Uhhhh (Score:5, Informative)
Depends on what they want to test. Here is a list so far: https://testpilot.mozillalabs.com/testcases/ [mozillalabs.com]
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Ctrl-t is my "most common button," followed by Alt-left arrow, Alt-B + down and right arrows, enter, tab, shift-tab, Ctrl-r, Ctrl-w, Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v, Ctrl-x ...
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I remember using those a lot more in the beginning of times when it almost always worked as expected. Nowadays, I still try it on new sites that I visit and I use it on sites where I know it works.
I always think "buffoons" when I visit a site where it doesn't work but I have to admit that I am pretty old guard on this matter... ;-)
Anyways, I have encountered very complex sites using newer technologies such as Ajax where the back button worked fine. So if you state it as a requirement when you start to desig
Re:O: (Score:4, Insightful)
Or three finger swipe on a Mac.
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Yep... and that's the most-often mistakenly given command I ever issue.
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Multitouch is amazing. I'd say get a Mac just for that, if I hadn't heard that windows 7 has some gestures, too. Mac has a decent gesture vocabulary, but they really need some way for you to define your own, too, especially as many applications don't support the full vocabulary.
At any rate, I love my "giant" (or as I now refer to it, "the right size") trackpad. The new iMacs should've come with a USB multitouch pad instead of the new mouse.
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The new iMacs should've come with a USB multitouch pad instead of the new mouse.
There's an app for that.
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Or three finger swipe on a Mac.
I only use a three finger swipe when there's no TP or paper towels. Then I spend a few minutes washing my hands.
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Backspace is even easier. Assuming you're not in a text field of flash object.
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Yeah was wondering that, so many people using gesture pads, arthritis inducing key combos...
Just Backspace.
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I just wish there were dedicated "next tab" / "prev tab" buttons on the keyboard rather than having to click the tab or do a variant on the Vulcan neck pinch to press "Ctrl + Tab"
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I have a mouse with a back button that maps to alt-left behind the scenes. Most other built-in functions I use mouse or keyboard-shortcuts for as well, so my most-clicked buttons would all be from extensions. Or to close background tabs.
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Middle mouse button would do if you must use a mouse.
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That's because firefox still doesn't do page caching properly. Afaik, only Opera does it close to right (Safari used to, with "snap-back" but then they limited it to just google for some stupid reason): you shouldn't have to re-download/refresh the head page when you're exploring links. Opening them in a buncha different tabs to get the same effect is a kludge.
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Explain exactly what you mean, please? about the improper caching, I mean.
I use "open in new window" all the time, due to not wanting to reload (or lose) some previous page. Old Netscape didn't seem to need to reload stuff, but Moz/SM is inconsistent about it.
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What I mean is that although it saves resources to a cache, instead of saving the fully-rendered page and just re-displaying that when you hit back, it re-loads the whole page, which more often than not means *checking* those very same resources and incurring the largest part of the delay: the chain of DNS lookups, initial queries, and gawd-awful dynamic bits.
I use "open in new window" all the time, due to not wanting to reload (or lose) some previous page. Old Netscape didn't seem to need to reload stuff, but Moz/SM is inconsistent about it.
That's exactly what I'm complaining about. If you were just *at* a page, you shouldn't need to reaload the whole thing just to check a link really qu
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What's funny to me is that I know technical people that will ignore the google search bar, type "www.google.com" into the url bar, search for wikipedia on the google homepage, click the top result, then FINALLY type their wikipedia search query into the wikipedia search box.
Re:People use the search bar? (Score:4, Interesting)
Though Chrome makes it one step easier by making anything that's not a properly formed URL into a search term, I still don't like Chrome compared to Opera....that DNS prefetch is terribly inconsistent.
Ha, amateurs! (Score:2)
I've stripped my UI to just the menus I need, the address bar and the search bar, for back I either use the mouse or backspace when I'm feeling fancy.
It's quite amusing to see someone else try to use it, though on the downside I don't have a girlfriend anymore.
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Hey amateur!
You do know that you can search using the "Address Bar"? And, believe it or not, you can use that same Address Bar to perform Wikipedia, Flickr, You Tube, Google Groups, dictionary, IMDB, etc. searches. ;-)
Google for "Firefox". Keyword "keywords"
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