Mozilla Labs Prospector Speak Words, First Firefox Add-On Without Restarts
One of the nice features of the Google Chrome browser is the auto-suggestion feature of the address bar. The web browser suggests websites once you start typing in the first letter.
If you want to load the first site, a tap on return loads the suggestion automatically so that you can open favorite websites faster as you only have to type some characters and not all of them in the Firefox address bar.
The Firefox add-on Prospector Speak Words adds that feature to Firefox. But more about that later. More interesting than that is probably the fact that it can be installed, disabled and removed without browser restart. That's a first, at least for me.
Back to the add-on's functionality. Prospector Speak Words adds Google Chrome's auto-suggestion feature to Firefox. Just enter a few letters of a website's name and the add-on will suggest the first matching Internet address by filling out the rest to complete the word.
The add-on is word-based, not url-based which means that it will only suggest words and names and not urls. Still, those words and names have to be part of a website's title or Internet address to be suggested in first place.
The add-on abides by the rules set for the Firefox address bar. I have for instance set it to only suggest bookmarks when typing in the first words. This add-on in this case uses only bookmarks to auto-suggest a word or name.
The default setting IIRC is to search in the browser's history and bookmarks.
Prospector Speak Words speeds up opening known websites in the web browser. The best case scenario is that you only need to enter the first letter and the enter key to load a website.
The add-on is an official Mozilla Labs add-on, which means that it may find its way into the core browser eventually. The add-on is only compatible with Firefox 4.0b4 - 4.0b8pre, and available for download at the official add-on site.
Update: The add-on is not needed anymore as Firefox displays suggestions once you start typing in the url bar automatically now.
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Have been using this for moths:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7423/
I don’t think if it is the first restartless add-on. There are several such add-ons already available at AMO. You can see them here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tag/jetpack
I pointed this out in a comment awhile back(https://www.ghacks.net/2010/09/12/google-chrome-dev-now-with-instant-search/#comment-1196888) when it was still in development. :)
You can see posts about it on Edward Lee’s blog here(http://ed.agadak.net/). Also note past blog posts by him have more restartless addons he has made.