AwesomeBar is truly awesome. It's right up there with tabbed browsing and find-as-you-type in terms of Will Change The Way You Use Computers.
Firefox developers should be very very proud of this feature.
David Naylor
· 1 year ago
Yes, I've found the biggest advantage is that you don't have to redo web searches that you did before. And if you do want to redo a web search, you can just type in one or two of the keywords and firefox will find the search page in your history. Wonderful!
Asa Dotzler
· 1 year ago
I think this feature is so awesomely awesome that it alone would warrant a full version rev. I can't wait for two hundred million people to experience the awesomeness of the AwesomeBar this year.
Chris G.
· 1 year ago
I agree, the AwesomeBar is simply fanastic. In fact, I cannot use IE or Safari anymore at all, since I keep expecting the address bar to do the same thing as the AwesomeBar.
Kelson
· 1 year ago
Somewhere in the middle of the beta cycle I started using Firefox 3 heavily. This single feature is so useful that I not only didn't go back, but installed the betas on 2 other machines.
I do 99% of my browsing these days in either a Firefox 3 beta or an Opera 9.5 preview (Opera 9.5 has a similar feature, though Firefox's implementation makes it easier to spot the page you want at a glance), and it's extremely frustrating to go back to Firefox 2 or use Safari. (As for IE, I haven't used it for anything but testing in years.)
voracity
· 1 year ago
I'm not usually one for superlatives, but 'awesome' is certainly appropriate here. I've cut way down on my web searches because of this feature (so maybe Google, etc. won't be too happy :) ). And it makes it easy to use even more 'dynamic keywords' --- for example, typing 'lo jo', then down/enter now takes me straight to the 'new journal entry' on my localhost. Brilliant stuff.
Pierre
· 1 year ago
@Kelson: >"Opera 9.5 has a similar feature"
Opera 9.5 can search since Sept. 2007, via the address bar, not only inside history and bookmarks, but _also in full indexed textual content of visited pages_...
-- Pierre
Neelark
· 1 year ago
Yes, it's by far the most useful addition to Firefox.
But for all those who are unhappy, please don't give up on it. You'll soon get used to the new behavior and Firefox will get used to your browsing habits and the results it returns will improve!
I have been using Firefox 3 since the first beta and after I type two or three letters in the URL bar, the page I want is usually in the top three results.
Well done, team Mozilla!
Billy
· 1 year ago
Just like tabbed browsing, this will be another annoyance that needs to be turned off immediately. Why reinvent the wheel and add more tabs (taking up more vertical real estate) when the Windows taskbar already does it for you? Some people with brains need to be put in charge of FF.
Billy2
· 1 year ago
billy how do i get to a particular browser instance with one click, visually seeing which browser window i want to click on to save me time before moving my mouse to the task bar using your method.
...Just curious.
bharadwaj parthasarathy
· 1 year ago
Heh deb,
first time out here. nice to see a very useful bar. But i am bit concerned about a few things.
Do we need two lines? It takes up a lot of space. i see that people are already reverting back to the url style to firefox2 in firefox3. There is a small hack, i guess you can post about that too.
Also i use my bar for a google smart search, for instance, i used to type in "java hashtable" to go directly to the java docs page. Is the search feature still there? I need this search feature more than any thing else.
I Do not hurt the web.. :-)
Stennie
· 1 year ago
I get the feeling that Billy doesn't use a dresser with drawers, he just simply throws all of his clothes into one large basket and claims superiority to his method.
Jason
· 1 year ago
Tell Microsoft and Apple to start the photocopiers.
Jean Azzopardi
· 1 year ago
Been using it a bit..lovely feature. I wouldn't call it life changing but it does making searching bookmarks that much easier! 9/10 for this new release overall!
Robin
· 1 year ago
I love the idea... hate the name. Is there a less lame term for the "awesomebar"? How about the "navtasticbar" or the "BarEssentials"?
"AwesomeBar" sounds like something that should have nougat in it.
mawrya
· 1 year ago
It would be interesting, no Awesome, to see if there is a noticeable dip in traffic to Google after Firefox 3 and the Awesome Bar are released.
M
· 1 year ago
Well by default it's only holding your history for 90 days, so it won't find stuff "from the last year" unless you have actually book marked it. At which point if you have book marked it, FF can find it forever.
You can easily set your "Keep History" to 365 days I assume, Lord only knows how much space that'll take up though.
Great run down all the same.
M
ps I love Carrot cake.
Byron McCollum
· 1 year ago
The "AwesomeBar" has an amazing amount of noise. Tone down some of the colors, you're killing me...
Jonah Dempcy
· 1 year ago
One more reason to love Firefox 3. I've been Fx3 Beta for a few months now but I still do a large amount of browsing and 100% of development on Firefox 2. Why? Because I can't figure out how to override extension max version checking in Fx3. If you can help me, I'd be grateful. :)
I can't live without extensions like Firebug, the Web Developer Toolbar and a handful of other extensions that facilitate web development. I tried overriding max version checking by adding a flag to the internal preferences, following a tutorial for how to do it in Firefox 2, but it didn't seem to work. Maybe the property name in the prefs has changed?
Cooner750
· 1 year ago
@Jonah Dempcy: Save the extension, rename it so it has a .zip extension instead of .xpi, extract it, open the install.rdf file in a text editor and change the Max Version property for Firefox to 3.0 (if you're using RC1) or 3.0b5 (if you're using Beta 5). Compress those same files back into a zip archive, rename it back to XPI, then drag and drop it into an open Firefox window.
Beware of unexpected results when doing this, as many extensions that haven't been updated to at least be compatible with 3.0 Alpha won't work at all.
Johnz
· 1 year ago
Sign, I can see how this can be really helpful. HOWEVER....there are some of use who bookmark items that we consider to be private. In other words, when I'm typing in digg.com...I don't want Firefox to begin displaying my bookmarks that happen to have the word d@ck in them (think porn). Will there be an option to turn this feature off?
W. B. Mook
· 1 year ago
Weirdly, IE 5.whatever for the Mac had a behavior like this (not the icon or the two lines, but the "matches against the page title" and I hung onto that browser for ages longer than I should have, just because it did. I've always been somewhat astonished that the feature hasn't cropped up in one of the living browsers since then.
Nilo
· 1 year ago
Johnz is absolutely right. Blaring the titles of previously visited web pages in BIG BOLD LETTERS is a major violation of privacy.
There is an extension called "oldbar" than can somewhat overcome this problem, but such an important setting should not require an extension. It should be a built-in option.
QB
· 1 year ago
Oddly, the FF3 AwesomeBar doesn't pull up visited URLs from my current browsing session, unlike in FF2. For instance, if I open gmail.com in the first tab, then open a second tab and type "gmail" it pulls up bookmarks that contain the word gmail, but not the URL gmail.com (which I have already visited). In fact, it doesn't display the "gmail.com" URL even if I type gmail in the URL bar of the first tab! Am I missing something?
Also, is there a way to modify the font size of content displayed in the AwesomeBar?
-=Ben=-
· 1 year ago
Customize the colors of your awesome bar based on it's type!
Tags are Yellow Bookmarks are Blue History Items are Green
All Comments
Firefox developers should be very very proud of this feature.
I do 99% of my browsing these days in either a Firefox 3 beta or an Opera 9.5 preview (Opera 9.5 has a similar feature, though Firefox's implementation makes it easier to spot the page you want at a glance), and it's extremely frustrating to go back to Firefox 2 or use Safari. (As for IE, I haven't used it for anything but testing in years.)
>"Opera 9.5 has a similar feature"
Opera 9.5 can search since Sept. 2007, via the address bar, not only inside history and bookmarks, but _also in full indexed textual content of visited pages_...
--
Pierre
But for all those who are unhappy, please don't give up on it. You'll soon get used to the new behavior and Firefox will get used to your browsing habits and the results it returns will improve!
I have been using Firefox 3 since the first beta and after I type two or three letters in the URL bar, the page I want is usually in the top three results.
Well done, team Mozilla!
...Just curious.
first time out here. nice to see a very useful bar. But i am bit concerned about a few things.
Do we need two lines? It takes up a lot of space. i see that people are already reverting back to the url style to firefox2 in firefox3. There is a small hack, i guess you can post about that too.
Also i use my bar for a google smart search, for instance, i used to type in "java hashtable" to go directly to the java docs page. Is the search feature still there?
I need this search feature more than any thing else.
I Do not hurt the web.. :-)
"AwesomeBar" sounds like something that should have nougat in it.
You can easily set your "Keep History" to 365 days I assume, Lord only knows how much space that'll take up though.
Great run down all the same.
M
ps I love Carrot cake.
I can't live without extensions like Firebug, the Web Developer Toolbar and a handful of other extensions that facilitate web development. I tried overriding max version checking by adding a flag to the internal preferences, following a tutorial for how to do it in Firefox 2, but it didn't seem to work. Maybe the property name in the prefs has changed?
Save the extension, rename it so it has a .zip extension instead of .xpi, extract it, open the install.rdf file in a text editor and change the Max Version property for Firefox to 3.0 (if you're using RC1) or 3.0b5 (if you're using Beta 5). Compress those same files back into a zip archive, rename it back to XPI, then drag and drop it into an open Firefox window.
Beware of unexpected results when doing this, as many extensions that haven't been updated to at least be compatible with 3.0 Alpha won't work at all.
There is an extension called "oldbar" than can somewhat overcome this problem, but such an important setting should not require an extension. It should be a built-in option.
Also, is there a way to modify the font size of content displayed in the AwesomeBar?
Tags are Yellow
Bookmarks are Blue
History Items are Green
See the code here:
http://userstyles.org/styles/8564
Amazing UserChrome Style!
ie: Put an AwesomeBar permenently at the top of the screen and have a window with tabs in it seperate from it.