Usually just skim the comments to gather insight as quickly as possible, if there seems to be a strong signal with depth, I'll add the HN page to Pocket (https://getpocket.com) and check back later when I clear through all the backlog of interesting things
HN has replaced Reddit for me. I'm still reading Slashdot, two decades later, it usually just dupes HN.
Also Lobsters (https://lobste.rs) has some decent content, similar position in that it often dupes HN, but interesting regardless
I still run a pretty basic ejabberd on Fedora. I've heard better things about Prosody, nowadays. (A while back I didn't transition to it due to some incompleteness in IPv6 support, but I'm told that that has since been fixed.)
regarding your first point, I believe you can make the address bar behave like you want simply by Edit->Preferences->Uncheck 'Provide Search Suggestions' and removing a result from your address bar results with shift-delete might also be what you're missing
Thanks for the suggestions. Unchecking 'Provide Search Suggestions' didn't help and I already had 'Show search suggestions in address bar results' unchecked. Shift-delete didn't help either. I made a somewhat longer reply to the sibbling comment of your comment but it turned out I did have a sub-page of washingtonpost.com.co bookmarked and for some reason it was just completing to the domain name and not showing the star. Deleting that fixed the problem. I also found browser.urlbar.autoFill to make it stop changing what I type. So yay firefox configurability.