Most users who have tried one of the beta versions or release candidates of Firefox 3 like the new location bar also called the awesome bar. A group of users however who openly express their opinion about the new location bar in the announcement “Firefox 3 location bar just became almighty” on Mozilla Links does not like the behavior of that new bar at all and prefer the old ways.
Now there is always a group that prefers the old ways simply because they are used to it. Talk to your parents or other elderly people and you will notice that they believe that many things have been better in the past and turned to the worse in later years.
I was able to identify two main points of criticism. The first is the mix of bookmarks and history items that are displayed when typing in words in the location bar. Some users do not want their bookmarks to appear in that list. The second complaint is the results window that opens when results are found in the location bar. Many users think it’s to big and ugly.
Here are some comments from users about the new location bar:
I just downloaded the beta and started using version 3, and this new bar is the worst implementation imaginable of what might actually be a reasonable idea. (I would have to see a good implementation before I can decide on that last part.)
I type in “ne”, and it sorts “slashdot-NEws for NErds”, and “groklaw.NEt”, and a few other things, BEFORE “NEws.google.com”.
If I WANTED slashdot, I would have typed “sl”. If I WANTED groklaw, I would have typed “gr”.
Do the people who design these things even type at all when they use the browser, or do just they think they are helping out old people who don’t know how to use a mouse with fancy icons?????
That AWFULBAR is so unbelievably bad – this add on at least makes it look better; but the algorithm and arrogance of the developers made me revert back to FF2. I may dump Firefox altogether. I know that some people will like the new bar, but totally outrageous to stick it on everyone. There will be MANY MANY people who would otherwise use FF that will swear off it now – there will be many embarassing moments as this algorithm BOLDLY displays unexpected results/history in public/group presentations, family situations, etc. Mark my words – this new feature will be the single most important event in the downfall of Firefox/Mozilla.
It is possible to make the Firefox 3 location bar look more like the old location bar of Firefox 2 which would at least remove the second complaint. The oldbar add-on changes the style of it to resemble the old location bar. It still uses the Firefox 3 algorithm to search through bookmarks and history.
There does not seem to be a preference for now that makes it possible to disable the bookmarks from being included in the search when entering characters in the location bar.
Do you like the new location bar or do you prefer the old one ? Let me know.
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Most of the people who hate this feature are probably geeks and nerds like me. Our reaction: “wow, i type in xy and this stupid program wants to tell me where i want to go, like it knows better…”
The people who like it will think this: “wow, i type in pete’s name and this cool program firefox shows me his myspace url instead of some stupid website.”
ofc there are more people in the 2nd group
I hate it, I have to type half of a freaking URL before it comes up with the one I want. I don’t need to see the title of webpages I’ve been to before, I just need the URL.
I’m going back to 2.0 until they can give us an option to turn this off.
The font is huge and annoying as well.
Rejoice! Anyone who hates it, look up the add-on called “Oldbar”. It will at least fix it until Mozilla makes an option for people to turn it off.
You can turn the new address bar feature off — in the address bar type “about:config” and then press “enter”, scroll down to the “browser.urlbar.maxRichResults” item, select it and change the value to however many prompts you want it to display… I am sure there are other options as well, but if you want it off, or just want a couple items to drop down, this is a quick fix.
So to not have it search through your bookmarks just:
1> Type about:config in address bar
2> browser.urlbar.maxrichresult change to 0
browser.urlbar.matchonlytyped change to true
browser.urlbar.autofill change to true
Worked for me.
I’ve been using ff3 for all of an hour or so. Immediate impression is that the location bar is TERRIBLE from a usibility point of view.
All they need to fix it is to assign some logic to the algorithm – use the following criteria to order the results (highest at the top of the bar).
1.domain name (starts with letters typed)
2.page title (starts with)
3.page title (a word in the title starts with)
4.domain name (contains letters – ignore less than 3 letters)
5. I dont really care after #4
GIVE ME A BREAK! I type in 2 letters and the site I want comes in 3rd after 2 sites that contain those 2 letters in the page title. Rubbish. Rotten. An hour of usability testing with people of ALL levels of computer saviness should’ve spotted this. This is a microsoft grade cock-up.
“It adapts to your selections with time. If you, just a few times, scroll to news.google.com it will start showing it up as the top result. Believe me i did not like the new bar initially either but once you use it you’d realize how much better it is from the earlier one.”
I don’t really want to have to spend time with my address bar, teaching it that I want it to be like it was in Firefoz 2. It just seems kind of backwards. I understand that it is great for some people, but I just don’t use my bookmarks and favorites like that. The websites I frequent are on my bookmarks toolbar, which is brilliant. The bookmarks in the folder are ones that I just want to keep to remember.
It just doesn’t work for me personally. I’m glad lots of people love it though. Maybe one day I’ll see the light.
I love the new speed with Firefox 3, but at the cost of having to put up with the ‘stupid location bar’. It’s so unproductive for me because I do my searches with the ‘search bar’ on the right, not the address bar on the left. The ‘stupid location bar’ has one of the most erroneously prioritized selection routines I’ve seen in a long time. Obviously if I start typing in news.g I probably want to go to news.google.com. To get google news to even show up under the ‘stupid location bar’ forces me to type the entire url in. That’s just one example!
The rendering, interface, and performance gains are superb in Firefox 3, but that address bar is a total pain. At least it’s not too bad to get rid of it. The old bar extension and some config changes took care of the problem for me.
All the functionality I want in the URL bar is “starts with” compare done on all URLs previously visited.
I like weighting by number of visits.
I do not like “word” compares with “titles” – it’s a URL bar, not a title bar.
Oldbar: reverts the old appearance, does not revert the “search only URL” behavior (yet).
browser.urlbar.richResults: no longer a supported about:config option.
browser.urlbar.maxRichResults: to 0 no longer shows dropdowns.
Any tips?
HATE IT!!! I liked it just fine the way it was before, why couldn’t they have made this awesomebar a selectable option for people who like the old way? Now I have to find a way to uninstall FF3 without losing all my old bookmarks.
I HATE IT. It’s like people say: if I type “ne” I get all kinds of site that I don’t want first.
If I want to go to ebay I start typing ebay and it first list a whole lot of ebay items I looked at before. That’s not what I want, I just want to get the main page of ebay.
The old behaviour rocked, for so many different reasons I can’t list them all here. Just two:
1) readability. The new bar is really hard to read for me, rows don’t work very good for my poor eyesight, columns were waaaay better. Plus, the icons simply kills my eyes. I like my stuff simple!
2) keyword searching is great, but I should able to decide if I want to use it or not. For me, is a total waste of time. I should be able to turn it off.
Not to mention that it accesses a database, albeit fast, EVERY time I type something in the bar. Why is this an issue? I am a web developer, and often have 20+ ff windows open, plus photoshop, text editors, ftp clients, and such. I’ve got plenty of memory to spare, but only so much cpu power… FF used to be the lightest standard-compliant browser around. FF3 may improve rendering time and memory usage, but it hampered everything else in terms of speed…
within two minutes of installing FF3 i was looking for a way to disable that horrible ‘feature’. it is entirely too big and intrusive, and is not something i will ever use. i almost never use bookmarks, and if i do, it’s just to hold on to a page when i don’t have time to browse it fully. i go back to it later then delete the bookmark. i don’t want them jumping at me every time i try to type a URL.
what i like very much, however, is the new ability to assign aliases to bookmarks and open them quickly in the address bar. so i disabled autocomplete and added bookmarks plus aliases for the dozen or so sites i go to every day. works great, and works silently :)
if you set browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped to True, then you get a plain old address bar again…
A major change to the interface should have an option to change its behaviour.
Oh for the days when Firefox was small and quick, might as well use IE these days!
My advise is if you do not like you HAVE to tell Mozilla, and tell them WHY just don’t ell them you hate it
This is their user feedback we link:
http://hendrix.mozilla.org/
Again tell them what you don like about it, and what you want it to do,
I hate it! I hate it! I hate it! I hate it! I hate it! I hate it! I hate it! I hate it! I hate it! I hate it! I hate it! I hate it!
Can’t disable this fucking shit. The addon only makes it LOOK like the old location bar. It needs to BEHAVE like the old location bar. Developers of firefox are just idiots. They don’t give the users chance to choose what they want to use. I thought this open source thing would higher up the quality of software but firefox developers are starting to behave like microsoft.
I’d like more space on the location bar to see the site address. Is there a way to remove the bookmark star and the RSS feed button? What a waste of useful space for things where there are shortcut keys to do the job.
I really don’t like that there isn’t an option to change this, and I will be writing feedback to Mozilla about it.
everything is OK except that annoying new location bar.(which I raelly hate so immediately return to my FF2)
can’t they keep it simple like FF2, that autofill function just getting on my nerves.
and included bookmarks in the bar, what’s the point then for having bookmarks.
I just hate these 2 new features. I planned on leaving Safari for Firefox 3, it won’t happen until I can fix this mess.
Hopefully Mozilla will add an option to go back to a regular behavior in a near future.
in FF2 if i typed a single word in the url bar, then it defaulted to use a google quicksearch (very handy not using any other search bar or toolrbar) ,
anyone knows how can i do this in FF3?
typing in the url bar a keyword, will default to a google search
How do you turn that shit off, its annoying as fuck.
Back to Firefox 2…it sucks b/c FF3 was great, but this was so f@#$ing annoying.
hi,
I have found that pssed websites that i have visited are being included when i type into the URL bar even though i have cleared my history. I presume this is because i have visted them more frequently than others.
Is there anyway to disable this smart bookmarks tracking feature?
Also, anybody know where places.sqllite is on the Mac? I cant find it anywhere!
Thanks
Chris
Back to FF2 for me. The idiotbar is completely unusable.
1. In the browser location bar type: about:config
2. type urlbar in the filter box
3. Look for the line that reads: browser.urlbar.MaxRichResults
4. Double click on that line — a box will pop up — change the integer to 10
5. Close the box
6. change browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped to TRUE.
7. have browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled;true set to TRUE.
I seem to be getting the behavior I want which is auto complete the urls but only search through urls that I have typed in recently. It doesn’t include my bookmarks anymore.
I think the bar is silly. Autocomplete on any program offers the ability to DISABLE it in the preferences. Sure some people like it but for those that don’t like an Autocomplete of any kind (especially in the URL box) there should be a check box in preferences to disable it.
NO..I don’t want someone jumping on my computer seeing my web browsing habits or even all my bookmarks.
I was SHOCKED that there was no preference option to disable this annoyance. My bookmarks are personal….I DON’T want them ‘auto-displayed’. I went back to firefox 2,0 and am using IE more now.
back to ff2
There is a add-on for Firefox 3 that is constantly being improved to try and replicate Firefox 2′s location bar.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7637
So far it looks like FF2′s, and doesn’t sift threw your Bookmarks.
Please report any bugs, do not use the review spot to post them. As the rules say.