I have to agree with you that if that is the kind of results you get when using the Location bar then no wonder you’re frustrated. Firefox 3.0.* is the fastest thing out there and not just according to official tests but my own as well so it’s ashame that a funky location bar is spoiling it for you.

After all this time since the initial release of Firefox 3.0 and all the using and testing thereof it is readily apparent that a significant group of FX users are experiencing this exact same issue while the rest (majority) of users are not, including myself. I’ve put a lot of research into this and this “non-adapting” location bar is very real for some folks. For those where the location bar works properly and adapts very quickly to how you use the browser, it’s an excellent feature but I can imagine what it’s like of you’re getting the kind of results you and others are getting.

What really needs to be done is to find out why this is happening to so many when it’s not happening to others instead of just telling folks to “learn to live with it” and the only way to do that is to stop commenting about this issues on places like “Mozilla Links” (they can’t do anything about it) and head to Mozillazine forums (Firefox bugs thread) and state the problem succinctly along with your OS information, list of extensions, whether you upgraded to FX3 over FX2 or that it was a clean install (the only way to go) and the Firefox version number. There could be any number of things that are causing the location bar results to go wonky and enough comments in the bugs thread as I described above could actually be used to find a pattern to all this.

Anyway, just my two cents worth. :D

Sure release a new version great but to then deny that people are unhappy with it & say that it will not be addressed is ridiculous & bad customer service ( I know you get what you pay for )

MOZILLA wake up listen to the people & resolve this now. I cannot even clear the damn thing so that I can start fresh the more site I visit the more crap it wants me to wade thru this is NOT an improvement.

OK my rant is complete Thank you to everyone who is attempting to fix this issue & a big FU to those who say “learn to live with it, this is how we feel you should work”

Why should I even have to spend day after day to try & teach this completely useless feature about my browsing? I tried it & it would not give me anything useful when I started typing a URL. I did give it time to learn. It just doesn’t work well when your browsing isn’t the exact same site every time.

The developers should have known that making it the only option for a URL bar, was going to make some people very mad. I don’t want my URL bar to give me a bunch of sites that have absolutely nothing to do with the URL that I am starting to type. I shouldn’t have to search for the URL I want by typing in a few words to get it when I should only have to type a couple letters of the URL.

The new Firefox URLbar is the same way. After a few uses, it learns what “temperature” you like your URLs.

Security risk? YOU control how much data is stored in your browser… via history, cookies and cache. The technology of the URLbar has nothing to do with security. If someone is sitting at your computer to type in the URLbar, then all your ’security’ is already gone.

The annoying part is that it does not search the beginnings of urls from the start.

Another annoying part is the bookmarks in the “awesome bar”. But that can be shut off (that is good for me).

Cool part is that it remember a lot of urls. And if you don’t remember the whole url you can just type some of it.

I haven’t used it for so long time yet, but I would explore it a bit more before I can tell if its crap or not.

I’m done with FF. The Mozilla people are worse than the MS people. At least IE doesn’t pretend not to be a piece of shit. Uninstall button, here I come.

(I could roll back to FF2, but, since FF3 is out, I’m sure support (like security fixes) for FF2 will last another 45 minutes or so… just like they did with v1 when 2 came out. which means that FF is now useless.)

Way to go, guys. Someone finally took a significant chunk of the browser market from MS, and they decided to deliberately fuck up the project, and then tell us that since the developers are the smart ones, they should decide what features we like.

Not only that, but I’m very concerned about two related security issues:

First, there appears to be no way to delete browsing history. “Clear Private Data” with everything checked does not delete the location bar’s knowledge of sites I’ve visited in the past. Even more disturbing, sites I visited using Firefox 2.x.x are showing up in the FF3 location bar. That means that even though I didn’t know it, FF2 was retaining my browsing history, again, despite the impression that it was ‘clearing all private data’ before. I hate to say it, but I’m going to start investigating other browsers to see if there’s one that’s more secure.

If anyone knows of a sure-fire way to erase the FF browsing history, and to turn off the location bar auto-complete, please post!

Thanks

I don’t find any problem with the new URL bar. It learns quickly.

…there should be a new option in the “Options” dialog box that will allow the user to choose what data they wish the Location Bar drop-down list to display. There might even be a way to choose whether to include the urls of each site to be displayed or not.

So if you feel you have to revert back to Firefox 2.0 until sometime towards the end of the year when version 3.1 is released then so be it. In the meantime, I and a whole lot of other 3.0 users will be happy with this new feature and will also be happy to wait until the next maintenance release (3.1) for the filtering to be incorporated. HATE-ing is such a waste of time and energy.

For example, I type in:

“a” and I get all my regular websites that contain an “a” near the beginning, the ones I visit most at the top of the list.

“f” and I get all my regular websites that contain an “f” near the beginning, the ones I visit most at the top of the list.

“w” and I get all my regular websites that contain an “w” near the beginning, the ones I visit most at the top of the list (not one site beginning with “www”, ever!.

How did I get this? By using the new feature for at least 3 days so it could learn how I use the browser and what sites I visit on a regular basis. This new feature is adaptive and needs time to learn your surfing habits and favorite sites . I also have to type in more than one bloody letter once on a while, God forbid, but never more than 3 once the location bar has learned what I want on a regular basis. The more you use it, the better it works.

And by the way, there is absolutely no way you can get any result in the drop down list of a place you’ve never been to. It’s impossible…it doesn’t work that way. The new location bar draws only on your Bookmarks, History and Tags (if you have any). In other words, if it’s in the list, you (or some else who used the browser) has been there before.

And saying that it Firefox 3.0 shouldn’t have been released unless without a way to turn it off (no, it’s not as simple as some people think) or anything else the users wanted or thought needed fixing was incorporated in the new version, then it never would have been released. Nor would any other software or OS out there. There’s absolutely no way that can happen.

With that said, I do have to agree that there needs to be a way to filter the results that appear in the drop down list but I also know that after 34 months of development, missed release dates, extra QA and testing and release candidates, the filtering (and other features) had to be left out until Firefox 3.1 when “History” data will be incorporated into the “Places” SQLite databases. Once that is done I would imagine there’ll be a new

Why do we always get one step backwards for every step forward?

It is totally unusable as it stands.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7637

:-D :-D

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=407836

Just add a comment at the end of the page… maybe they’ll listen to our request!

Me. I download the code and I’m building it. If everything is working fine, I think I will be able to disable the search in the titles, bookmarks and so on.

I will keep you posted here.

JM