User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:100.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/100.0

Steps to reproduce:

Make a new search. Navigate to search page or any other tab.

Actual results:

Search term from the previous search is still there and needs to be manually cleared before a new search can be performed.

Expected results:

Firefox should automatically clear previous searches after default number of seconds or minutes. There should also be a about:config pref to customize (shorten/lengthen in milliseconds or disable) this period/feature.

Please can you explain what you mean by "Make a new search"? Do you mean using the separate search bar on the toolbar, or something else?

(In reply to Mark Banner (:standard8) from comment #1)

Please can you explain what you mean by "Make a new search"? Do you mean using the separate search bar on the toolbar, or something else?

Yes i mean making a search in the search box/widget in the toolbar in the right side.
Tho from what i see navigation bar (where WWW etc is displayed) searches are tab specific while search box searches are displayed regardless of what tab i click on.

Actual results:
Search term from the previous search is still there and needs to be manually cleared before a new search can be performed.

On my system after pressing Ctrl+F the search term is highlighted, so you can just type ahead or paste. No "manual clear" needed. What is different in your case?

This is potentially a duplicate of bug 253331. I don't think we'd implement a time on it as the timing could be very subjective even for one person doing different tasks.

However I'm not marking it as duplicate yet, as Andre has a good point - whenever I go to the search bar (at least on Mac), the term is highlighted so all I need to do is to start typing and the term gets erased. Is there something different going on here?

(In reply to Andre Klapper from comment #3)

Actual results:
Search term from the previous search is still there and needs to be manually cleared before a new search can be performed.

On my system after pressing Ctrl+F the search term is highlighted, so you can just type ahead or paste. No "manual clear" needed. What is different in your case?

This relates to Find bar instead of search box. I'm talking about the search box.
It is possible to activate it with CTRL+E or CTRL+K depending on the context with previous term highlighted but this still requires user input to clear the search box.

My suggestion is for Firefox to clear this automatically after a period of inactivity without user input.

(In reply to Mark Banner (:standard8) from comment #4)

This is potentially a duplicate of bug 253331. I don't think we'd implement a time on it as the timing could be very subjective even for one person doing different tasks.

However I'm not marking it as duplicate yet, as Andre has a good point - whenever I go to the search bar (at least on Mac), the term is highlighted so all I need to do is to start typing and the term gets erased. Is there something different going on here?

Yes i did see that bug myself. As i understand the search box code may change in the near future and thus it does not make sense to implement additional functionality at this time. Very reasonable. I just hope that when or if it is rewritten this functionality is added.

Previously i was still using old v56.0.2 due to add-on compatibility. I just moved to v100 earlier this month when it was released and i would gladly use an add-on to get this feature but as far as i can see no add-on offers this functionality like for example Searchload add-on did back in the XUL era.

Thankfully this is mostly just a visual quirk where i don't want the previous search term sticking around (privacy reasons) while also not wanting to initiate manual input to erase it every time.

The only other functionality i miss is the switch back to last active tab when closing current active tab as per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1771360

Marking as dupe of bug 253331 since that seems to be closest to what you want. As I said previously I don't think we'd be able to get a works-for-everyone implementation for time-based.