The Firefox "Awesome Bar"

Written by Tony

Wednesday, 02 July 2008

I've been using the new Firefox 3 browser a couple of weeks now, I guess, and it's great. They seemed to have combined how the Camino browser looks with the Mac version - meaning, the buttons on pages look like Mac style buttons. That's fine, I suppose, but it just makes more of a difference between Mac and Windows so from a web developer point of view, I'm not too thrilled about that.

But the address bad, dubbed the "Awesome Bar" is truly that - awesome... almost scary. It seems to know what site I'm looking for next like it's reading my mind. It happens several times a day, saving me time. I think I'm the kind of user that can move so much more faster than the computer allows me. When I do demonstrations, people ask me how I get around through different programs so quickly. Anway, this awesome bar has saved me lots of time, I just love it.

The great thing is that you don't have to start typing a URL. I saw someone trying to find a site the other day and he was typing in "http://www" and I said forget that and start typing in the name of the page and within a few seconds, he found the page. So it's something to get used to and you have to kind of change you habits.

-T

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even more awesome
written by James Rotering, July 03, 2008

I got in the habit of typing the first letter-or-two of a site name (instead of using bookmarks) back with firefox 2. There are lots of cases where there's only one site I visit that starts with the letter 'A' or whatever letter - so it was like having single-keystroke shortcuts to my favorite sites.

Because I had those habits, I'm finding that F3 doesn't do as good a job of "reading my mind" as others are saying. It seems to match the letters you type against all of your recently visited sites - not just at the beginning of the hostname, but *anywhere* in the name. For example, I just went to type the letter 's' to get a site I wanted that starts with s... and your site came up as the second choice because of the s in "It*s* a Blog About Nothing". Sheesh! In my opinion they need to refine their algorithm a bit or something. But like you say, it is a matter of adapting your habits.

The coolest feature I've come across is that you can scroll through your tabs. Most people probably don't open enough tabs where you would need to scroll through them. But I kind of go crazy with the tabbed-browsing, and I'll have like 15 or 20 of them open in a single window - more tabs than fit across the screen. You used to have to use arrows on either side of the tab-bar to get to the ones that were off-screen. I discovered by accident that now in F3 you can hover over your tabs and use the scroll button on your mouse to shuffle through them in a really slick way.

Awesomeness. Now that I can do that, I'll probably start leaving 30 or 40 tabs open!