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Categories: Mozilla News Tips & Tricks

A Little Something Awesome about Firefox 3

106 responses

Deb Richardson, author of the about:mozilla newsletter, wrote one of the better explanations I’ve seen on the “AwesomeBar,” Firefox 3’s revamped URL bar.   It’s not the most humble of names, but if you check out Deb’s post you’ll see why it’s earned it.

In Deb’s words, here’s a quick snapshot of what makes Firefox 3’s URL bar just so awesome:

Dubbed the “AwesomeBar”, it lets you use the URL field of your browser to do a keyword search of your history and bookmarks. No longer do you have to know the domain of the page you’re looking for — the AwesomeBar will match what you’re typing (even multiple words!) against the URLs, page titles, and tags in your bookmarks and history, returning results sorted by “frecency” (an algorithm combining frequency + recency).

Not only that, but the drop-list results show you the page’s favicon, the full title, the URL, and whether you have bookmarked and/or tagged the page in a richly formatted two-line display.

2421200414_77674b14a4_o1.png

Example:  I start by typing “ginger”, and AwesomeBar searches through my history and bookmarks to return everything that matches that keyword, showing the first six and letting me scroll through the rest. You’ll notice here that several of the results are bookmarked (blue star icon on the right), and tagged (tag icon). The sites’ favicons are displayed on the left, making it really easy to scan through the results if you know what site you’re looking for in particular.

Check out Deb’s post for more on the AwesomeBar and check back here for more on the cool things to expect in Firefox 3!

106 comments on “A Little Something Awesome about Firefox 3”

  1. Ping from iOS 4 features: Safari URL bar gets “awesome” | iPhone, iPad Weblog on

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  11. Ping from Summer of Awesome « Greetings from the Real World on

    […] to Comments Mozillians love the word “awesome.” Not only does Firefox have the “awesome bar,” but it’s also pretty much everyone’s go-to description for everything, well, […]

  12. Ping from User Experience: How Mozilla Tab Candy will push the browser war – Get Organize and Getting Things Done | The Productive Organizer on

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  15. Ping from How to get the Firefox AwesomeBar in Google Chrome’s OmniBar » Jay Goldman on

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  20. Ping from Sync bookmarks across browsers and iOS devices — Devin Reams Blog on

    […] sites and actions (bookmarklets) that I want to quickly access from launchbar and the awesomebar: email, calendar, task list, billing system, client websites, personal finance websites, […]

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    […] que uséis Google Chrome y echéis en falta la asombrosidad de la Awesome Bar de Firefox, about:flags y “Enable better omnibox history […]

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