03:16 
Thu, 19th June 2008
Users Question Awesomeness of "Awesomebar"
Firefox edition 3, currently in beta, is impressively faster and inferior memory-hungry than preceding versions. That makes my machine pretty happy. The another most perceptible change, though, has garnered integrated reactions from users of the beta. The become forbid has been changed, with such fanfare, into the “Awesomebar“.
The newborn forbid is large — apiece place displayed when it drops downbound gets digit lines of account that allow the URL, the tender title, and the searched keywords. But also the progress is different.
I’m habitual to typewriting “wir” in the become forbid and sight it alter up URLs that move with that string, wired.com existence the first. The Awesomebar searches every finished the become and tender title, and not meet in my story but also in my bookmarks, so “wir” brings up fanpages for Wire and The Wire, as substantially as miscellany aforementioned a place whose tender denomination includes “cell phones, wireless phones, sim cards”.
The forbid learns adaptively, they say, and is questionable to provide more coefficient to sites wherein your progress appears at the first of the become kinda than somewhere in the region of the title. But it breaks a field commandment of programme design: don’t radically modify the activity of something everyone’s utilised to, especially without including an choice to convey to the due behavior.
Users are unhappy. There’s an spreading titled oldbar that makes the forbid countenance aforementioned the older one, but its galling activity is ease the same. Rumor has it the choice is so unfathomable in the newborn cipher that it’s hornlike to toggle, but become on, people.
(image borrowed from Mozillazine commenter Fedorov)
See Also:
- Firefox Still Has Problems On Apple’s New OS X
- Help Mozilla Reduce Firefox’s Memory Footprint
- Firefox Update Patches Quicktime Flaw
- Slim Firefox’s Memory Use By Disabling Problematic Add-ons
Melted From: Wired: Compiler
March 22nd, 2008 at 1:26 am
Firefox 3 Beta 5 will match on word boundaries, so the so in the screenshot provided, ghacks.net will be the second result — right after the match for ghisler.ch. But even in Beta 4, there is an adaptive learning so that if you type “gh” and select ghacks.net, it’ll be the first result when you type “g” next time.
If you want to try out some potentially-incoming features, use this pre-beta5 build:
https://build.mozilla.org/tryserver-builds/2008-03-21_17:06-edward.lee@engineering.uiuc.edu-awesome.smallNfast.bar/