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Sadly, the browser.urlbar.matchonlytyped no longer works in Firefox 3.5. There is more information here. Specifically see the part on browser.urlbar.default.behavior. I currently have mine set to 32 to match the old "matchonlytyped" behaviour.

I wrote up a proposal for a passive solution to hiding porn results from the AwesomeBar, much in the same way that AdBlock Plus passively solves the problem of preventing ads from being displayed on websites: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/2/5/43412/24669

Apparently there are already hooks present in Firefox's userChrome that allow the user to specify, on a per URL basis, sites to be prevented from appearing in AwesomeBar results: http://ed.agadak.net/2009/02/hiding-history-with-userchrome

OMG, I made a mistake. The link for "options" that I posted is outdated. This one describes the current situation.

http://ed.agadak.net/2008/07/firefox-31-restricts-matches-keywords You can both stop crying now. Mozilla has a new glass of milk for you.

FWIW, they've landed performance improvements for the AwesomeBar to Fx3.2.

BTW, does anybody know the reason behind the large jump in download size from 2.x to 3.x? Not that I really mind, but I remember the download size being one of the main reasons cited for pulling the Mozilla Suite (which I had been happily using since M7) and going with Firefox instead.

The Smart Location Bar searches your history and bookmarks, so even if you clear your history, it can still search your bookmarks. So the reason why your location bar is still showing your porn sites even after clearing history is because you've got them bookmarked. In Firefox 3.1, you can change a preference to default search only your *visited* history (and not your unvisited bookmarks). http://ed.agadak.net/2008/07/firefox-31-restricts-matches-keywords

Did you RTFChangelog? In 3.1, it's much more customizable. You can append an extra character to tell it to only look in history, or in typed urls, or bookmarks, or tags. And there are the browser.urlbar prefs to disable any of these.

For Alpha 1, you can restrict the search to your history by typing "^", or bookmarks with "*", or tagged pages with "+". To make what you've typed match only in the URL type "@", and for title/tags only use "#".

There are now more ways to configure the Smart Location (Awesome Bar) functionality which should make most complaints go away:

http://ed.agadak.net/2008/07/firefox-31-restricts-matches-keywords

I'm sure that this reply will get lost in the noise of all the other "I hate Awesome Bar" replies.

The awesomebar is a real advance. Keep at it, I think you'll come to love it. It started great and continues to get smarter in nightly builds. The frecency (measure of how frequently and how recently) is very good at picking the right URLs. If the wrong things shows up, just enter another sequence from the title or the URL ("news bbc front" OK! {Enter}).

You semi-consciously learn to pick words that work, e.g. I type {Ctrl-L}cairo march{Enter} for mailing list archives, {Ctrl-L}Dash{Enter} for my blogger home page, etc. It's MUCH faster than navigating bookmarks, much better than URL completion, and no need to set up a keyworded bookmark.

One of the developers blogged about recent changes, http://ed.agadak.net/2008/03/using-the-awesomebar and invites feedback.

(But Slashdotters should drop the shitty "Firefox developers are idiots for not doing it the right way!" attitude if they want busy developers to spend more than 5 seconds considering their bitching.)

The best new feature is the so-called Awesome Bar, the new url input.

It takes a couple hours to get used to, but it's simply fantastic. Kudos to the team that implemented it.

It's got a gmail icon there as well, but don't set the bad bouncing one as a home page.. it could get annoying after a bit ;)
http://ed.agadak.net/googlex/badBounce.html

Here is another working version (faster):
http://ed.agadak.net/googlex/

Also check out the discusion group at:
googlex

How odd.. There used to be an OS X like interface for Web Images Groups, etc links as images that resize when you mouse over.

"Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you."

I managed to save the large images from firefox cache and modified google's cache of the page to use those images. The small images were clearer instead of being a resized large image, but I couldn't save those as well as the Video search images.

http://ed.agadak.net/search.htm