One of Firefox’s strong points is the convenient position of the search bar. Located right next to the address bar and above the bookmarks toolbar, the search bar can be easily accessed. Instead of spending extra time required to browse over to your search engine’s homepage, you can simply assign the search bar a default search engine and type your queries in it.

Add-ons for Firefox let us customize and improve almost any part of the browser. For the search bar too, we have an add-on that lets us customize the way we work with it; this add-on is titled Searchbar Autosizer.

After installing and enabling this add-on you will be able to have your search bar expand according to the length of your query.

This way the entire length of your query is readable.

The options for the add-on can be accessed to specify the search bar’s minimum and maximum lengths in pixels:

Now suppose you have installed multiple search engines. Your default one is Google but occasionally you use Wikipedia. You want to search for a band on Wikipedia so you use the arrow to change your engine to Wikipedia, type the band’s name in the search bar, and press ‘Enter.’ You will notice that your search engine stays on Wikipedia and does not revert to Google, your default engine.

In Searchbar Autosizer’s options, you can check the second-last checkbox and have your search engine return to your default one each time you submit a search query.

Many Firefox users will find quite useful the simple functionality this add-on introduces to the browser.