Firefox 3’s location bar power for Firefox 2

Craving for Firefox 3’s almighty location bar? Get some relief with Autocomplete Manager, a Firefox extension developed by Nikitas Liogkas.

AM delivers a big chunk of Firefox 3’s location bar, mainly, the ability to get autocomplete suggestions from bookmarked addresses and titles. Plus the entered text doesn’t have to be at the beginning of an address or title but anywhere.

Press Ctrl + 1, 2… 6 and results are sorted using Firefox default criteria, top level pages first, most frequently visited, most recently visited, alphabetically by address or title; effectively outmatching the awesome bar.

Bookmark results are displayed with a different style to make them easy to spot in the list.

AM is not short of options on how do you want to see data. A well organized page lets you set whether you want to include bookmarks, match titles, exclude search results and local pages, how to sort results, how to truncate results, number of results, etc.

As a bonus feature, it also lets you remove individual entries from Firefox history, something that may be helpful at some time but not enough for me to be an extension on its own. So I better appreciate it as a bonus feature.

Compared to Firefox 3 location bar, just two shortcomings (sort of): it doesn’t highlight the matching part (which some users may find positive), and, it doesn’t include tags, since well, there are no tags in Firefox 2. And a common vice: it adds an unnecessary, unwanted, and worst, unremovable item to the Tools menu.

But in the end, it is a keeper for me. I already miss Firefox 3’s location bar when I turn back to Firefox 2 and AM effectively delivers the same power.

Get Autocomplete Manager from Mozilla Add-ons.