By default, when you search in the search widget in Firefox, it brings up the results in your current window/tab. If you search a lot in context, this is probably not what you want since you then lose your context.

To get around this, I typically open a new tab, and perform my search in there. Even if I forget to open the tab before I enter my search criteria, you can open the new tab after the criteria is entered but before you press Enter (or the button) to perform the search.

Turns out there is a much easier solution to this problem. You can set a hidden configuration setting so that when you search in Firefox the results are always shown in a new tab. Here's how to set this up.

- Type about:config in the address bar.

- Scroll down to the entry labeled browser.search.openintab, the value will be set to false. If you double-click on this entry, it will toggle the value to true. Once this value is set to true, all of the searches you perform in the Firefox search widget will have the results open in a new window.