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Firefox 3.1 Alpha "Shiretoko" Released
Just as you were getting used to 3.0, those Mozilla guys have announced 3.1's Alpha release. FTA "Built on the pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, Shiretoko includes a variety of new features. Called an 'early developer milestone,' the release includes bug fixes, improved Web standards support, Text API for the Canvas Element, support for border images and JavaScript query selectors, and improvements to the tab-switching function and the Smart Location Bar." You can download it if you dare.
I loathed the Awesomebar too. When I first started using it I would type "s" and it would list sites I only visited once, a year ago, because they had an "s" somewhere near the end of the URL, while sites with 's' near the beginning were listed much lower. This is obviously broken functionality, but I'm seeing less and less of that sort of thing the longer I use it. The longer you use it the better it gets; it has some kind of sorting algorithm that takes a while to get going properly. I have found typing a single word of the page title to relocate a page useful on occasion, and I now go for days at a time without cursing this unremovable feature.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
I could already do that in FF2. Awesomebar added nothing but annoyance.
But hey, that's what add-ons are for, right?
I, personally, do not use Ctrl+tab to switch between tabs in firefox but I do not like the idea of them changing this functionality. In various other programs I use that have tabs, from mIRC to Visual studio (no, sorry, I haven't switched to *nix yet), ctrl+tab is the natural choice to swap between open tabs/windows and I do occasionally use this command here. It just seems universally consistent between most applications and Mozilla has decided to move away from this unofficial standard.
Wouldn't it be better to give this new functionality a new shortcut key, such as the aforementioned ctrl+pgdn?
Even Microsoft created a new shortcut key combination for Flip3D in vista and left the old alt+tab command more or less in tact.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I'm sure that it's not really Slashdot he's talking about, merely using it as an example.
The drop-down menu history is VERY useful as a temporary set of bookmarks which you will only need for a short period (say a month) and don't want to litter your real bookmarks with.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
For me Firefox is now bookmarking every site I visit
That's the problem. The awesome bar conflates two different and important functions, the address bar and bookmarks. If they had provided a smart bookmarks feature instead of ruining the address bar, no one would be complaining.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
As Firefox 3 includes a Smart Bookmarks feature (by that exact name, stuck automatically in your bookmarks bar), I'm honestly unsure whether you're trolling or just ignorant.
I love the awesome bar, but that comes largely in part because all of the URLs on my company's website and intranet haven't been nicely converted to pretty permalinks and I'm not a big fan of trying to remember KB article IDs and stupid crap like that. I just type the first few letters of the article name and it's in the list.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Are you trolling? The awesomebar lives up to its name. Among all the other good stuff that came with 3, that one stands out and I wasn't expecting it to.
red pro -> programming.reddit.com
flix mem -> www.netflix.com/memberHome
s gmail -> https://gmail.com
It even pulls words out of the titles of pages I've visited, so I don't even have to remember the url.
As a web developer it makes my work easier as I can type in for example 'dev lookup 1445' and it will often pull up a url like www.longdevsitename.com/longblah/lookup.php?uid=1445, which often happens to be exactly what I was looking for. Firefox 2 doesn't even come close to this.
However, if you want to look at a Wikipedia article about Dashiell Hammett that you read last week, it makes a lot more sense to type "Dash" in the address bar than "wikip^H^H^H^H^Hen.wikipedia.org/Dash."
Actually it makes more sense to just put "Dashiell Hammett" into the search bar. It makes no sense to put anything other than addresses into the address bar.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Because if the OP doesn't find the feature useful, then no one is allowed to either, dammit. Otherwise his worldview is shot because he'll be forced to confront the fact that he is not, in fact, the arbiter of taste for the population at large.
Having the choice to disable a such controversial feature is the freedom developers give to the end users. I wish they continue listening to the customers. How much I hate it when a supposedly "addon" features become sticky behaviors of an application. I often do not type the url bar. Google does a better job when I want to find a website
although it has a painfully stupid name that makes me want to hate it already
That's really the -biggest- strike against it. The presumption that I or anyone else would think its awesome immediately triggers the hate response. If they'd simply called it 'enhanced address bar', made it optional but default, and described it as 'awesome' there wouldn't have been this massive resistance to it.
The reality is that its really good. I can reliably pull up a LOT more url's with a lot less effort. It is true that some of the mnemonics for urls that I was used to in FF2 don't work, and I've had to expand to 2 characters or 3. But after using it since release, 's' brings up slashdot first again. But what's even more interesting, is that the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th results are all also sites I frequent regularly, and FF3 has made it easier to get to them. I don't use bookmarks nearly as often now. One of my clients has a page listing its branch offices that I need to refer to frequently for contact information... i used to pull up their site and browse to the locations page, or use a bookmark... in FF3 i type 'loc' and its the first match. The next few matches are the list of locations for a couple of other businesses I've looked up recently... which is also useful.
I really have nothing negative to say about FF3's address bar.
To those people who are finding a couple of their most frequently used sites have moved 'down' the list, the benefits do outweigh the cost. Push through it, so that FF3 can learn or choose a new mnemonic for that url; it -is- worth the trouble.
Its pretty amusing really on some level. This is the sort of thing we routinely ridicule our less nerdy counterparts for... we mock them for their refusal to use a product called 'firefox' because it doesn't sound 'professional' like 'internet explorer'... we ridicule their inability and/or blind refusal to cope with even a slight deviation in user interface... we tell anecdotes about how we had to set Windows XP's theme to classic before our bosses could/would use it...because it was scary and different... or because it looked like 'candy' and they didn't want to use a childish OS.
And yet here we are... its comical to see how many of us 'enlightened' people are hung up on the feature name, or the fact that a couple keyboard shortcuts are working a bit differently. Aren't we the same people who are supposedly able to effortlessly transition from platform to platform, from distro to distro, able to pick up any pieces of electronics and figure it out. Last time I checked, we weren't known for buying a new phone and rejecting/hating it simply because the menu arrangement wasn't identical to the old one, or because it had to 'learn' our preferred autocompletions for text messaging all over again. People we mock and ridicule do that. How does it feel? :)
Anything I've visited within the scope of my history is easily accessed via the address bar. Anything new I want to find is best accessed via the search bar. This is much the way its always been, except now the address bar is better at it. For me, it has completely supplanted bookmarks, as the sites I go to most often are shown by default, and any that don't make the cut are showing within 1 or 2 letters.
You seem very anti-awesomebar, as I was at first, but I'm curious if your complaint is more philosophical (I don't like the idea of it) or practical (it doesn't do what I want it to). Because I'm almost positive that you can get the awesome bar to act very much like the old bar if you continue to use it that way. If you hit 's' to get to slashdot often, slashdot will quickly become the first result when pressing s. If you like to hit 'so' to go to "someotherwebsite", that will quickly become your top 'so' result. The behavior of the awesomebar can be as predictable as your browsing habits.