AwesomeBar is awesome
In Firefox 3 the URL bar is being completely revamped in extremely exciting ways. In Firefox 2 the URL bar is fairly staid and plain, giving you a drop-list of recently-visted URLs and partial page titles. If you started typing in the Firefox 2 URL bar, it would generate a drop list of URLs whose domains matched what you were typing, like so:
It would only match the start of the domain, however, so typing “mozi” would only list URLs that started with “http://www.mozi…”, which doesn’t include things like “http://developer.mozi…”. Those would only be listed if you started typing “developer” in the URL bar:
This is OK behaviour. If you happen to know the URLs of the pages you’re looking for, the Firefox 2 URL bar will help you out by giving you a list of URLs whose starting bits match what you’re typing. Saves a little time, and becomes a quick way to get back to sites whose URLs you have at least partially memorized. If you were hoping to revisit a site but you didn’t know how the domain started, you’d be out of luck and would have to resort to using one of the major search engines to look for it.
Enter AwesomeBar
In Firefox 3, however, the staid and plain URL bar has been transformed into a much, much more powerful and useful tool. 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.
Here are some screenshots illustrating the magic. I tend to look up a lot of recipes on the internet, and the other day I wanted to find the recipe for a spicy ginger carrot cake I’d seen somewhere in my surfing. Here’s how the new AwesomeBar makes this unbelievably simple:
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:
Instead of scanning and scrolling, however, I just add another keyword, “carrot”. AwesomeBar updates the list to show only the three results that match both these keywords:
Adding one more keyword, “cake”, narrows the list to just a single option:
Et voila. Out of thousands of entries in my bookmarks and history, AwesomeBar has found the single “ginger carrot cake” recipe I had read somewhere online in the past year. I had no idea which site it was on, so wouldn’t have been able to search by the site’s domain. Even Google wouldn’t have helped me here since this recipe doesn’t appear until the 8th page of results when searching for “ginger carrot cake”. AwesomeBar searches only my personal, local bookmarks and history, making it an incredibly powerful tool for finding pages that I’ve visited before and want to find again.
I’ve been using the Firefox 3 nightly releases for some time now, and I can honestly say that the new AwesomeBar behaviour has absolutely changed how I use the Web. Not having to remember URLs or resort to global web searches to find pages I’ve visited before has made using the Web a whole lot easier and more efficient.
So, yeah. AwesomeBar? Awesome. If you’re willing to play with not-quite-fully-baked software (by which I mean “beta”), you can experience the awesome yourself by grabbing the Firefox 3 Beta 5 download and testing it out.
Want to read more?
Edward Lee, the primary AwesomeBar developer, has written a bunch of blog posts over the course of AwesomeBar’s development:
- SmartBar to AwesomeBar - Nov 4, 2007
- Not Just Awesome - Jan 6, 2008
- Another Way to Awesome - Jan 19, 2008
- Beyond Awesome - Mar 3, 2008
- Using the AwesomeBar - Mar 11, 2008
- Awesomeness in Beta 5 - Apr 8, 2008
Bo:
AwesomeBar is truly awesome. It’s right up there with tabbed browsing and find-as-you-type in terms of Will Change The Way You Use Computers.
Firefox developers should be very very proud of this feature.
17 April 2008, 12:31 pmDavid Naylor:
Yes, I’ve found the biggest advantage is that you don’t have to redo web searches that you did before. And if you do want to redo a web search, you can just type in one or two of the keywords and firefox will find the search page in your history. Wonderful!
17 April 2008, 12:59 pmAsa Dotzler:
I think this feature is so awesomely awesome that it alone would warrant a full version rev. I can’t wait for two hundred million people to experience the awesomeness of the AwesomeBar this year.
17 April 2008, 8:46 pmChris G.:
I agree, the AwesomeBar is simply fanastic. In fact, I cannot use IE or Safari anymore at all, since I keep expecting the address bar to do the same thing as the AwesomeBar.
17 April 2008, 8:50 pmKelson:
Somewhere in the middle of the beta cycle I started using Firefox 3 heavily. This single feature is so useful that I not only didn’t go back, but installed the betas on 2 other machines.
I do 99% of my browsing these days in either a Firefox 3 beta or an Opera 9.5 preview (Opera 9.5 has a similar feature, though Firefox’s implementation makes it easier to spot the page you want at a glance), and it’s extremely frustrating to go back to Firefox 2 or use Safari. (As for IE, I haven’t used it for anything but testing in years.)
18 April 2008, 12:35 amvoracity:
I’m not usually one for superlatives, but ‘awesome’ is certainly appropriate here. I’ve cut way down on my web searches because of this feature (so maybe Google, etc. won’t be too happy :) ). And it makes it easy to use even more ‘dynamic keywords’ — for example, typing ‘lo jo’, then down/enter now takes me straight to the ‘new journal entry’ on my localhost. Brilliant stuff.
18 April 2008, 1:04 amPierre:
@Kelson:
>”Opera 9.5 has a similar feature”
Opera 9.5 can search since Sept. 2007, via the address bar, not only inside history and bookmarks, but _also in full indexed textual content of visited pages_…
–
18 April 2008, 1:41 pmPierre
Neelark:
Yes, it’s by far the most useful addition to Firefox.
But for all those who are unhappy, please don’t give up on it. You’ll soon get used to the new behavior and Firefox will get used to your browsing habits and the results it returns will improve!
I have been using Firefox 3 since the first beta and after I type two or three letters in the URL bar, the page I want is usually in the top three results.
Well done, team Mozilla!
20 April 2008, 8:46 amBilly:
Just like tabbed browsing, this will be another annoyance that needs to be turned off immediately. Why reinvent the wheel and add more tabs (taking up more vertical real estate) when the Windows taskbar already does it for you? Some people with brains need to be put in charge of FF.
20 April 2008, 10:36 pmbharadwaj parthasarathy:
Heh deb,
first time out here. nice to see a very useful bar. But i am bit concerned about a few things.
Do we need two lines? It takes up a lot of space. i see that people are already reverting back to the url style to firefox2 in firefox3. There is a small hack, i guess you can post about that too.
Also i use my bar for a google smart search, for instance, i used to type in “java hashtable” to go directly to the java docs page. Is the search feature still there?
I need this search feature more than any thing else.
I Do not hurt the web.. :-)
22 April 2008, 3:35 amStennie:
I get the feeling that Billy doesn’t use a dresser with drawers, he just simply throws all of his clothes into one large basket and claims superiority to his method.
23 April 2008, 8:49 amJason:
Tell Microsoft and Apple to start the photocopiers.
23 April 2008, 12:07 pmJean Azzopardi:
Been using it a bit..lovely feature. I wouldn’t call it life changing but it does making searching bookmarks that much easier! 9/10 for this new release overall!
23 April 2008, 2:08 pmRobin:
I love the idea… hate the name. Is there a less lame term for the “awesomebar”? How about the “navtasticbar” or the “BarEssentials”?
“AwesomeBar” sounds like something that should have nougat in it.
23 April 2008, 3:19 pmmawrya:
It would be interesting, no Awesome, to see if there is a noticeable dip in traffic to Google after Firefox 3 and the Awesome Bar are released.
23 April 2008, 7:14 pmM:
Well by default it’s only holding your history for 90 days, so it won’t find stuff “from the last year” unless you have actually book marked it. At which point if you have book marked it, FF can find it forever.
You can easily set your “Keep History” to 365 days I assume, Lord only knows how much space that’ll take up though.
Great run down all the same.
M
ps I love Carrot cake.
24 April 2008, 3:42 amByron McCollum:
The “AwesomeBar” has an amazing amount of noise. Tone down some of the colors, you’re killing me…
6 May 2008, 5:54 pm