Firefox 3 smart bar is just too smart

It learns while you use it, so the sites you like (news.ycombinator, news1130.com, etc) will get to the top the more you use them.

As someone mentioned above, it learns your habits. It irritated me at first, as any fairly major feature change would, but it is pretty awesome and useful.

When I find that I visit a site so often that I habitually key in the first few characters, hit down, and hit enter, it is time to bookmark it and give it a keyword (in a bookmark's properties). After doing so, (as an example) if I go to the bar and type 'hn' and hit enter, it automatically takes me to http://news.ycombinator.com/. I think using this feature would benefit you, and maybe ease your hatred to mild distaste, and, just maybe, eventually you'll even _like_ the Awesome Bar.

I wish you luck.

People only want to learn one thing. If there's a default way, and an optional way, most people will use the default, so you'll be able to expect it and learn it. If, however, everyone is forced to choose at the beginning (without a default), there will be a pretty even distribution of people with and without the feature enabled. In a case where this severely affects the usability of the browser for those who aren't used to it (e.g. those who expect to be able to use the beginnings of URLs in the smart bar and can't, and, vice versa, those who expect to use keywords in the "old bar" and can't), this causes problems.

For example, say you wanted to set up computers for public use at a school or library. Which way is it better to set the option? If it were a default/option pair, it would obviously be better to set it to the default, since people would be more familiar with it. If, however, it were just two equally valid options, which one would people be more likely to be familiar with? Multiply this by every possible [add-on on/add-on off] pair, and you have, perhaps, 1000 or more default browser configurations, any of which are equally likely to run into in the wild!

Anyway, on your first point, I think users need to be a little more sensitive to the fact that, if they don't allow themselves to be pushed out of their comfort zone every once in a while, their experience using their software (or anything for that matter) will never improve. If a feature worked crappily, one would never know it until they adapt to the "new way" enough to see how bad it was before. Until then, their comfort with the old way makes them much too partial to be a good judge.

Hrm. I wonder if PG has IP banning figured out yet.

Give it some time, I thought it strange at first but after a few days once it learned what I wanted most of the time it became very useful.