Does the awesome bar awe you?
It’s been about two months since the awesome bar officially reached millions of Firefox users with Firefox 3 final release. Since then, reception has been mixed (even at the Mozilla Summit): some people (like myself) have get used to it so much that it makes hard to use other browsers (yeah, Opera 9.5 has it as well) or older Firefox versions.
On the other side, people are crying foul because it can accidentally reveal a web page (porn, secret gift, Oprah, etc.) they don’t want others to know about. Or because they don’t like its look or takes too much space. Or because they found confusing the change of behavior. There are some workarounds available and Firefox 3.1 will provide more customization options, but still this could be not enough.
So, how is it going for you? Share your experience in the latest Mozilla Links poll and feel free to drop your comments below.
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August 13th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
I can see how it may be too revealing for some… but honestly, people shouldn’t be visiting sites that they may be embarrassed by ANYWAY (ie: porn).
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Mirek2August 13th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
And if they are, why not just delete them from the history?
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MorbusAugust 14th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Question is, why should anyone be embarrassed by porn? It’s the internet, ffs!!! It’s kind of a given…
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MorbusAugust 14th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Also, people that use the same computer should really have different firefox profiles. Firefox is such a personalizeable browser it’s a bit wierd how different people use the same…
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LucyNovember 26th, 2008 at 10:03 am
Ryan: Didn’t you ever land on a porn site by mistake? Mike: I can do it, of course, but I I like to type the first two or three letters and pick the site I want from the drop down list. I’m usually the only one who uses my computer, but occasionally my sons and my grandson do it too. It’s not about porn, which I don’t like, it’s about my PRIVACY. Morbus: More and more non techie people is using FF, they only want to see pages, not to learn about how to erase history or how to use different profiles.
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August 13th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
One really easy and valuable way to make the Awesome Bar look AMAZING is to install this style:
http://userstyles.org/styles/8564
It colors your awesome bar based on it’s type (bookmark, tag, or history)
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August 13th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it either. I can live with it, I can live without it. That said, it does make it easier to search through history to find “that one site that was really awesome” or something like google reader that’s easy enough to find, so you don’t really need to bookmark it, but having it at the top of the list as soon as you type “g” doesn’t hurt.
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FerdinandAugust 14th, 2008 at 1:22 am
You can launch your bookmarks from the awesome bar. Just begin to type the word of the website you want. As soon as you see it in the dropdown box click it. Now begin to type the website again until you see it in the dropdown box and click it again. With this behavior the awesomebar will learn that that site is very important to you and place it at the top of the dropdown box. Now you can active this website with 1 or 2 key presses.
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LucyNovember 26th, 2008 at 9:51 am
Why on earth should I waste my time teaching my preferences to my browser? I can bookmark my favorite sites way more easily and they won’t be replaced if for any reason I must visit the same page many times one day. I have my own brains, I don’t need my browser to tell me what is important for me! I rolled back to FF2 the same day I installed FF3 because of that awesome annoying bar. I’ve used an recomended FF for years, but they don’t allow us to disable that hideous function and get back to the way it used to do if we want in the short time, I will switch to some other browser.
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August 13th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
I love it and use it as is. Firefox 3 has dramatically improved my browsing habits.
I’m really sloppy about keeping my bookmarks organized. REALLY BAD. I tried the del.icio.us thing for awhile, but was even too lazy to keep those organized.
The Awesome Bar is everything it promises to be for me. I just click the star when I want to bookmark something, and I usually add in a few keywords too. Pulling it back up makes my life a breeze.
I can’t imagine browsing without it.
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August 13th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
I want to be able to censor results, for example when I type “g” it prompt me gaytorrent.com with google (maybe because I visit it too frequently), but I want to be able to censor every site with “gay” or “sex” or “porn” in the name, but only when I want to enable censorship, I think an extension should be the right thing, I will look into it.
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August 13th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Is this post written in LOLspeak? “people is crying foul” / “how is going for you”
:^)
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Percy CabelloAugust 14th, 2008 at 9:26 am
Sorry about that! :( It’s corrected now, thanks!
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August 13th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
My wife discovered some of my fetishes thanks to this “awesome bar” and now we’re in counseling. However, the counseling is making our marriage the best it’s been in years. We were getting very close to filing for divorce but thanks to this little discovery we’re much more intimate now that she knows what kind of stuff turns me on and things haven’t been better. Mozilla, I thank you for helping save my marriage. I thank you for allowing me to love my wife again. I thank you for not putting our children through the terrible experience of a divorce. God bless Firefox, God bless Mozilla, and God bless the Awesome Bar!
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August 13th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
With some tweaking I was able to get to like it. The more I use it, the more I start to like it. Just a big shock the first time I came across it.
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August 13th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Love it, especially in combination with the ‘Unfilled Bookmarks’ in Places.
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August 13th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
I love awesomebar! I think that one easy way to stop the porn would be for an extensions to allow you to provide a list of tags which should not ever be displayed in the awesome bar (e.g. “porn”, “adult” or “xxx” etc)
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August 13th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
I’m still set in my ways as far as bookmarks go, using the bookmarks menu. I don’t have enough bookmarks that I’d need help searching for them. I do find the Awesome Bar valuable when searching through history for a site I want to see again, but don’t visit often enough to bookmark, such as a specific Wikipedia article, etc.
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August 14th, 2008 at 12:53 am
I agree with nitwit88, I never love it or hate it. I’m still getting used to it, and it may grow on me, but so far it’s just a novelty. Unlike Nathan, my bookmarks are well organized, so the need for it is less. Also, I’m still not used to the tagging concept, so I don’t have any.
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August 14th, 2008 at 4:34 am
It should be possible to block certain domains from being recorded in the history. This could be a setting on the permissions tab or the security tab of the page info dialog.
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August 14th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
A cranky accolade…
I love the damn thing I just hate the name. It’s a great feature but it ain’t awsome and it doesn’t awe me. The official name is the Location Bar by the way. Be that as it may…
I’ve always despised cascading menus especially when trying to haul through my severely bloated bookmarks trying to find that one medical site I visited last year when the VA threatened me with surgery. Now the VA is actually going to do the surgery and thanks to the so called Awesome Bar, all I did was start typing in the phrase “drawn and quartered” and up popped the correct bookmark just like that. I’ll never have to deal with those cascading bookmark menus from hell again.
And if you can’t remember where your favorite XXX video is located, for heavens sake don’t bookmark it. Instead, install the the “Scrapbook” extension and bookmark it there (and then rename it Bertha’s Garden Secrets or something to that effect).
Have a great day.
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August 15th, 2008 at 5:23 am
completely useless for me. All my bookmarks are organised and are one click away on the bookmark toolbar. I don’t maintain a history for more than a day and I have no need for tagging.
I’ve simply set browser.urlbar.maxRichResults = 0 problem solved.
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August 17th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
The so called “awesome bar” is very useful even if it looks strange at the beginning, it saves a lot of typing, but it have problem with cyrillic encoding (448881)
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August 19th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
This stuff is pretty juvenile compared to IE8 features!
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August 21st, 2008 at 10:07 am
As a developer I find it very very annoying. I’m always typing in urls of websites I’m developing and tab completing. The new search bar breaks the mode of working that I have used since the beginning of the web browser.
I have since downgraded to firefox 2 because development on websites became too frustrating with 3. Please provide an option to completely revert back to the functionality of FF2.
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September 4th, 2008 at 8:29 am
I downgrded after like 3 h back to FF2 can’t stand the Awfulbar in FF3
so im going to use 2.x for ever or mabye go tsome other borowser that let me turn of this kind of adressbar that FF3.0 has
when some one gives an option to have FF2 adressbar behave like it should in FF3
then i will upgrade ,i don’t care about the security updates in FF so i can use 2.0 for a long time
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September 11th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
My 2¢ worth: Brush up (or get up to speed) on keyboard shortcuts. Once you become accustomed to using K/B shortcuts, there’s lots of stuff that you can quickly change — e.g.,
Alt+V, T, N to toggle on / off the location (awesome, navigation) bar;
Alt+V, T, B for the bookmarks toolbar.
So you can both have it or not have it, as you prefer…
–Ken
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