A Firefox extension to turn off the AwesomeBar has been out since February. Oldbar https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227
That only makes it look like FF2. It still uses the same annoying way of guessing what URL you want.
Firefox 3 smart bar is just too smart
21–30 of 57 posts
Re: Firefox 3 smart bar is just too smart
#22--> 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.
Not having any sort of URL defeats the purpose of having a history. There has to be (and already is) an in between. It's what Firefox 2 and every other browser has.
And according to my IRC conversation with someone on #firefox # irc.mozilla.org earlier, Firefox 3.1 will have the option of having. They even have the patches all ready. So why it's not in Firefox 3 is beyond me.
Re: Firefox 3 smart bar is just too smart
#23--> 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.
Not having any sort of URL defeats the purpose of having a history. There has to be (and already is) an in between. It's what Firefox 2 and every other browser has. And according to my IRC conversation with someone on #firefox # irc.mozilla.org earlier, Firefox 3.1 will have the option of having. They even have the patches all ready. So why it's not in Firefox 3 is beyond me.
> Not having any sort of URL defeats the purpose of having a history. There has to be (and already is) an in between. It's what Firefox 2 and every other browser has.
Yeah, which is why that setting is pretty much useless. Also, when setting that property to 0, it causes the screen to flicker intermittently when typing in the address bar (at least on Mac OS X Tiger).
Re: Firefox 3 smart bar is just too smart
#24Good 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 o…
> But then you have to balance that with the overhead of supporting an "old" feature for the sake of old users.
That's the thing actually - supporting the old behavior in case of FF3 wunderbar is trivial as it's just a subset of the new behavior. Just restrict latter as this:
(a) search for a match only among the URLs
(b) match at the head of the URLs; skip "www." when matching if it's present
Re: Firefox 3 smart bar is just too smart
#25While I agree that there should be a way to disable the awesome bar, it's worth nothing that it does take some training and getting used to. The awesome bar uses historical data from previous searches, so if your search for "news" always ends with you clicking on HN, it will put that at the top. Over time, the bar will learn your preferences and become much more useful. I hated the bar at first, to the extent that I…
I like that Mozilla went out there and tried to change things around. I'm just wondering what the rationale behind not allowing the previous way to be used is. Don't suppose you know or have an inkling?
My problem with "awesomebar" is that while it does bring up the sites I visit often (which FF2 did, and given they're a small number of social/news sites; /., reddit, hn, facebook, nytimes, etc its not exactly difficult to list), the order they're listed gets mixed up every time I try to visit a site.
reddit.com showing up ahead of news.ycombinator.com when typing "news" for example doesn't make me like this new way of figuring out what URL to go to (guessing randomly? I'm sure there's an algorithm behind it but after using it since RC1, it still looks random to me) what URL I want when I'm typing the URL in the URL bar.
Re: Firefox 3 smart bar is just too smart
#26While I agree that there should be a way to disable the awesome bar, it's worth nothing that it does take some training and getting used to. The awesome bar uses historical data from previous searches, so if your search for "news" always ends with you clicking on HN, it will put that at the top. Over time, the bar will learn your preferences and become much more useful. I hated the bar at first, to the extent that I…
Well, it may sound strange and counter-intuitive, but when I am typing something in the address bar, I am typing a URL. Not searching God knows what in God knows where. I know that in FF3 I could be, but that's not what I am used to. So all non-URL stuff that smartbar throws at me is just a noise that I have to filter out.
As I said above - the transition logic for FF2/IE/etc users was not thought through AT ALL.
Given it's a smart bar, I expect it to be more flexible in its configuration, so that I could adjust its smarts as needed. E.g. it could have configurable weights that control how important a match in particular piece of data is. This way I would've zero'ed the importance of everything, but the matches at the head of the URL and happily went about my business without ranting :)
Again, this sort of flexibility is not a hard thing to implement nor does it pollute or burden the UI in any way. Why this or something similar didn't make it into a production release is beyond me.
Re: Firefox 3 smart bar is just too smart
#27I've never hand any of these problems, the awesome bar is brilliant. Sure I'm not entirely sure where the sites I use all the time are but that is what bookmarks and keywords are for. d for digg, s for slashdot, f for facebook. The awesome bar is brilliant as a tool for finding search results you are trying to get back to, you have search friendly URL's that are indexed quickly, I can navigate my web app if I remember any part of the URI. This will be a big call for search friendly URL's as identifying a page by the id number just won't hack it when I'm looking for something by subject. This is the biggest improvements from FF2 to FF3, just let it grow on you. The aesthetics here are following the function, this URL is easy to read.
Brilliant.
Re: Firefox 3 smart bar is just too smart
#28As 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…
When I find that I visit a site that often, I subscribe to the rss feed. I use keywords for searches: / for google, m-w for merriam-webster, and so on.
I use http://yubnub.org in the Firefox search bar for that. It has commands for nearly every search you could imagine. I'm a bit of a command-line-geek, so that likely factors into its appeal for me.
Re: Firefox 3 smart bar is just too smart
#29wat i hate happen is when i type in "p" it automatically goes to pornhub! m definitely not going to install ff3 in the computer down stairs.
Re: Firefox 3 smart bar is just too smart
#30While I agree that there should be a way to disable the awesome bar, it's worth nothing that it does take some training and getting used to. The awesome bar uses historical data from previous searches, so if your search for "news" always ends with you clicking on HN, it will put that at the top. Over time, the bar will learn your preferences and become much more useful. I hated the bar at first, to the extent that I…
I like that Mozilla went out there and tried to change things around. I'm just wondering what the rationale behind not allowing the previous way to be used is. Don't suppose you know or have an inkling? My problem with "awesomebar" is that while it does bring up the sites I visit often (which FF2 did, and given they're a small number of social/news sites; /., reddit, hn, facebook, nytimes, etc its not exactly difficu…
I'd like to point out that Opera 9.5 alpha had this feature before "Mozilla went out there and tried to change things around."