One of my favorite features of OmniWeb was the ability to type a shortcut and immediately go to the site it represented. This was carried over (and more poorly executed) in Chrome browsers using the "search engines" or "site search" functionality. Orion also has that via "Custom search engines" but they fall short in the following ways:
- They require the presence of
%sin the "Search URL template" - To invoke in the URL bar, you must type a space after the shortcut and then press return
Ideally, you'd be able to enter your shortcut, press return, and then be taken to the intended URL. If there is a %s token, then the shortcut would be activated by pressing space or tab.
I've set up dozens of these such shortcuts in my current default browser Brave (and did the same back in the day with Chrome). I'd love to have different "Custom search engines" for my "Personal" and "Work" profiles so that I could even define the exact same one but the destination URL would be different and contextually-related.
Here's my basic (and probably most common) use case:
a-> https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/external-search/?field-keywords=%s&mode=blendedao-> https://www.amazon.com/gp/css/order-history?ref_=nav_orders_first
If I type ao then I go to my Amazon orders page. If I type a then space I initiate a search for whatever I type next.
Another use case where I might want the same shortcut to go to different URLs based on Profile would be aws. I might want to create a "Dev" profile that goes to one region and a "Production" profile that goes to another:
aws-> https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/console/home?region=us-west-2#aws-> https://us-east-1.console.aws.amazon.com/console/home?region=us-east-1
If I carefully built the profiles, then I could switch between them and be able to navigate very quickly without having to remember different shortcuts. (In Brave, I use aws for staging and awsp for production, which is not a huge deal except when I forget my naming convention.)
