Check here

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perform-firefox-tasks-quickly

Customized Keys - Addons

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/customizable-shortcuts/

Ctrl+K will set focus to the search bar on the Navigation Toolbar if that search bar is positioned on a visible toolbar or in "3-bar" Firefox menu button drop-down list. If you move the search bar to the Customize palette then the about:home page opens in the Firefox 30.0 release and you no longer get the Google website like in older Firefox versions.

Bug 940685 - Load about:home instead of the engine's searchForm when the search bar is customized away

1.10      let openSearchPageIfFieldIsNotActive = function(aSearchBar) {
1.11        if (!aSearchBar || document.activeElement != aSearchBar.textbox.inputField)
1.12 -        openUILinkIn(Services.search.defaultEngine.searchForm, "current");
1.13 +        openUILinkIn("about:home", "current");
1.14      };

Please do not comment in bug reports
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html

Thank you for the second link, iamjayakumars. It looks like it has potential for some other things I have in mind.

The first doesn't help, sorry to say. Both ctrl-k and ctrl-e have the same effect, as I described above: they bring me to a Mozilla/Firefox-wrapped version of Google, when I want to go to plain old google.com.

Thanks, cor-el. I'll have to look at what you suggest tomorrow -- fried from work right now.

cor-el:

Unless I am misreading, it sounds like you've given a very solid answer as to why the behavior changed and why it cannot be changed back. Thanks.

As you may have guessed, I (long ago) removed the search bar from the navigation toolbar in my customization of Firefox. I just now put it back to verify that ctrl-k would move the focus to that window, and it does.

If you or anyone else wants to know, I choose not to have the search bar display in my nav toolbar because I'd rather have maximum display space for the location bar, to better be able to see long URLs. And, if I have to pick, I'd rather have ctrl-k display about:home than always have to have the search bar taking up space in the UI.

It appears from cor-el's response that there is no way to "change back" the behavior of ctrl-k as I had hoped, so I thought I'd post this workaround I thought of yesterday: use Firefox's "smart keywords" search, and just don't enter a search term before pressing enter.

That is, following the instructions at Mozilla Support's How to search IMDB, Wikipedia and more from the address bar, define g to point to the search window at google.com, and then instead of ctrl-k, do ctrl-l g.

Why would I want to go to google.com and enter the search term there, rather than just append it to the smart keyword directly? Because sometimes I'm unsure of spelling, or phrasing, and I like to get the help of the drop-down suggestions.

Why would I prefer plain google.com to do this, versus the about:home page, which also has the suggest-as-you-type behavior? For the Google Doodles. No other reason.

Thanks to iamjayakumars and cor-el for taking the time to post answers. I think we can consider the matter closed, if not completely solved.

You can also move the search bar to the "3-bar" Firefox menu button drop-down list if you do not want to have it on the Navigation Toolbar. It works there as well (Bug 901207), so Ctrl+K will open that menu list with the search bar selected (having focus).

Hey! That's pretty cool. Thanks, cor-el.

Is anyone able to confirm that it has been a permanent change?

If so, it determines the necessity to play with workarounds, if not some of us (incl. me) may choose to work for next release.

The trick given by bjkeefe is a nice solution, though it kills the idea of shortcut (not because of bjkeefe's fault but because of FF requirements) - as instead of a single click, we need to make a click + type two keys (g + ENTER). Sometimes may be quicker just to click the HOME button... Thus it would be much appreciated if we could get back to the old solution. My reasons for this exactly match those given by bjkeefe.