Quickly switch searches with AwesomeBar HD

Please download Firefox 4 to watch the WebM video.

Full-size video (0:50) downloads: webm (7mb) and ogv (4mb)

Transcript:

AwesomeBar HD provides categories in the location bar to help me find exactly what I want. Instead of having to first doing a generic web search and looking through the results, I can jump straight to tweets about beltzner. If I now wanted to check up on his work background, I can easily switch within the “people” category to LinkedIn.

This concept of using the same search query with a different web search isn’t new. Going to Google, we can see this similar functionality promoted along the left. And Bing has the same thing along the top.

But having this as part of Firefox allows you to pick the provider that you want. So if you prefer Flickr for pictures over the ones linked from the generic web search, you can activate it directly from the location bar.

Additionally, having this integrated with the browser can lead to a better user experience. If you’ve watched very carefully, you might have noticed that switching search results immediately loads the pages as Firefox has pre-fetched the results.

Easy switching of providers

Try out AwesomeBar HD on Firefox 4! You don’t even need to restart Firefox to begin playing around. The Prospector team is very interested in hearing back from you, so please install it for a bit, and let us know what you think.

As usual, you can check out the recent fixes and submit issues or suggestions if you have any!

Ed Lee on behalf of the Prospector team
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