Firefox 3 smart bar is just too smart

[ I don't have a blog, so I'll rant here instead ]

FF3 came out today and I followed the crowd and upgraded to it. Within 5 minutes it became obvious that I passionately hated new "smart bar" feature.

A smaller thing was that it wasted tons of screen real estate and just didn't look esthetically pleasing. It rendered auto-complete items in two lines. It also made the whole list look like an Xmas tree with its liberal use of fonts, bolding and favicons. Apparently this particular "improvement" was so good that the FF3 devs removed a setting for disabling it from the about:config page. One now has to resort to using an add-on called "oldbar" instead. This made the suggestions list far more compact and it looked way cleaner and more usable.

However a far more annoying change was how smartbar populated the list. It matched what I typed not just to the head of the old URLs, but to any part in them. And to the bookmarks. And to the bookmark descriptions. And the page titles.

So typing "news" no longer brought up a list of news.ycombinator.com, news1130.com, etc, but rather slashdot.org (News for Nerds), digg.com (All News, Videos ..) and some other obscure URLs that I didn't even remember visiting. They say it learns and will eventually put most relevant URLs at the top of the list. Great, thanks. This just solved a problem that I didn't have to begin with. And it all would've been well, but here's a kicker - YOU CANNOT DISABLE THIS.

This leads me to the reason why I decided to make this post. This situation is a good example of how not to approach adding features to the application.

1. New features and behavioral patterns. These can be the defaults for new installs and this should gradually migrate everyone to the new feature set. However users arriving to a new version via an upgrade path should have their experience preserved as intact as possible.

2. Replacing features instead of adding them. You can bet that there are users that explicitly depend on existing behavior and taking it away is a big deal.

FF does not conform to these principles. Also by looking at the Mozilla forums it is obvious that the devs were aware of the problems these changes created, but decided to ignore them. Too bad really. It's not like it would've been too much work to handle these changes a bit more gracefully.

/eor

Good points. I've been using FF3 since alphas and have gotten used to the "smart bar". (I didn't even know it was called that until today.)

I tend to agree though. I'm still being driven nuts that Google's favicon has changed. I think companies need to be sensitive to all the momentum that people bring to their products.

But then you have to balance that with the overhead of supporting an "old" feature for the sake of old users.

This might have been one of those things that might have worked better as an add-on. I think it might have been kinda slick when you first fire up FF3 to be presented with a choice of basic add-ons to play with, like "Smart Bar".

Disclaimer: I work for free :B

  --> about:config
  --> set browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 0

This appears to work, but at the expense of removing the URLs you typed in the address bar. So I guess your point is still valid.

Personally, I think the Awesome Bar is fantastic.

I agree that when you start using it you hate it, but I've grown to love it. It's one of those little learning curves, and you learn to start typing what you mean instead of a cryptic URL. I think this is one of those things that "normal" users will love because it matches how they think. And us techy folks will learn to love it because it really does make more sense.