Thursday, June 19, 2008

Firefox 3.0 "Awesome" Bar

The new Mozilla Firefox 3.0 has been newly installed on my work computer and from the word go it is an amazing piece of work. It feels snappier and web pages seem to load and render faster than the previous version 2.0. But the most jarring change is with the url bar (some people call it the Awesome bar or Smart bar). Unlike version 2.0, it comes with a smarter auto-complete algorithm and rich text display (see the figure below); the auto-complete is no longer limited to the first characters of the url.

At first, using the new url bar felt awkward but I can see benefits of using it, so I'm going to keep it. There is a Firefox extension - the OldBar here at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227 that you can install if you really don't like the new url bar and prefer how the urls look in the old way.

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