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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

There are a lot of add-ons available for Firefox now, and I was wondering which you think are the most interesting, useful, innovative, or otherwise awesome. These don’t have to necessarily be your “favourite” or “must-have” add-ons (although they can be), just those that you’ve seen and played with and thought were particularly neat, useful, smart, or well designed.

Post a comment here (moderation is on, so it could take a while for your comment to show up) or email me privately at deb-at-dria-dot-org.

A while back I threw together a quick brainstorm about how maybe we could improve Live Bookmarks. Today (via Lifehacker, the most useful site on the intertron) I discovered the LiveClick Firefox add-on. It’s not perfect, but it does give you the ability to “Mark All Items Read”, and a few options about what that means. Very cool. There’s room for improvement to be sure, but I think this is a great start at extending Live Bookmarks.

Update: There’s more information over at LiveClick’s MozDev project page. This is good stuff.

So…maybe it’s just me, but I have yet to figure out a simple way of searching for people’s accounts on Twitter in order to befriend/follow them. It’s been a long time since I had to hack a URL to do this sort of thing¹ and it bewilders me every time.

Anyhow, I want more twitter friends. You can find my page here and add me if you like. I’m even considering making my updates public, which is unusual since I tend to be a relatively quiet and guarded person. Twitter is entrancing me in new and unusual ways. Is it a mini-blog? Is it a chatroom? Is it an instant messenger? Is it a link sharing service? It’s being used as all these things and more, and it’s absolutely fascinating to see what people will do with such a simple tool.

Twitter + The Coop

Speaking of Twitter, I’d like to see it integrated with The Coop sometime. Being able to post/receive twitters that way would be pretty slick. Having a Joga-like notification system (that can be easily turned on/off to minimize unwanted distractions) would be neat, too.

Since I’m on the topic, here are a bunch of other ideas I have for The Coop:

• integrate Skype for one-click calling
• use it as a Web feed handler so as to subscribe to friend’s blog feeds and get update notifications through it
• use it as a microformat handler for phone numbers, addresses and the like
• be able to tag your Coop-mates into groups for quick multi-person sharing of links and files (?)
• IM integration for quick and easy IM-status notification
• one-click “send mail to…”
• one-stop “update all my statuses at once” functionality
• view friend’s status regardless of service — twitter, facebook, whatever
• etc. — the list goes on and on really

I doubt these are all phenomenal ideas, but The Coop has a huge amount of potential as an integrator/aggregator for any/all services and such that can be grouped by person. I find it all quite exciting.

Unfortunately, I still haven’t taken the time to learn how to hack add-ons (at this point I’m sort of waiting for FUEL), so I have zero ability to actually follow through on my 3am braincrumbs. In the meanwhile, I’ll keep watching Twittervision.

Note: The Coop source is available in public SVN, as Myk mentions over here, if you’re interested in hacking and contributing.

¹ – This is actually a lie. I hack URLs almost daily, but it still bewilders me.

I have a Firefox add-on I cannot live without: Faviconize Tab. It’s simple, tiny (7k), and with session restore makes my life much easier and more productive. It seems too good to be true, but I’m serious. The basic funtionality of this add-on is that it lets you to right-click on a Firefox tab and shrink it down to just the size of the favicon. Simple, convenient, awesome.

Here’s a screenshot (note, tab colors are provided by Chromatabs):

The four favicon-sized tabs on the left come up every time I open my browser because I have specified the “When Firefox starts: Show my windows and tabs from last time” option in the “Main” section of my Firefox preferences. These tabs are: my Gmail account, my work-mail account, my Remember the Milk task list, and a web forum I visit frequently. Since these faviconized tabs have no close buttons, they’re always open, always in that order at that side of my tab bar, and have simply become part of my regular browsing experience.

I love it. I can skim through my email, task list, and forum without having to dig around for bookmarks, and because the tabs are so tiny they never get in my way. I’ve been using it for months and Faviconize Tabs has definitely made my “must have” add-ons list.

Last night I decided that it was time (for no real reason) to start fresh with a brand new Firefox profile. The profile I had been using was old and crufty, dating from at least the DeerPark Alpha days. Of course, a new profile means no bookmarks, so I have a choice: I can either use my old bookmark file, or I can start fresh.

My bookmark file, I discovered, is 1.5mb.

I’ve decided to start fresh. Instead of piling all those bookmarks back into my browser file, I’m going to hand select the few I use all the time and stash all the other used-only-occassionally-or-just-the-one-time bookmarks over in my Jots online bookmarking account.

Usually I have Jots post my daily bookmarks to my weblog, but since I’m going to be adding several hundred to it over the next few days, I’ve disabled that particular feature for the time being. If you would like to see what I’ve got stashed over there, you can go check out my whole Jots bookmark collection. You can even subscribe to its RSS feed if you like.

Exciting times.

I also picked up a copy of the train game so I can experience the joys of train time like my friend phik.

Matthew Gertner, CTO of AllPeers.com, kindly gave us permission to reprint his article Creating Custom Firefox Extensions with the Mozilla Build System as part of the Mozilla Developer Center.

The article is excellent but could use some additional content, particularly in the “Building for Multiple Platforms” section. If you have the time and knowledge to help fill in some of those gaps, your contributions would be appreciated.

Many thanks to Matthew for writing (and allowing us to host) the article.

Noticed a little red “Update Available” in the corner of my Performancing editor/extension this morning. Clicked it, reinstalled, et voila. My favourite update (and, really, the only one I’ve noticed so far) is that the “Performancing” item in the context menu is no longer at the top (where “Back” should be and has been for the last, oh, forever). Thank god.

Update: Also included in this update is the ability to add Technorati tags to posts. Not the greatest UI decision I’ve seen in my life, but the feature is there at least. I’m a shade wary of feature-creep for this extension, but so long as the UI is finessed so it all works nicely, it’ll be ok.

In other Performancing-related news, Asa tells me that the SpellBound spell-checker extension integrates seamlessly with Performancing. I haven’t tested it yet (I’ve always had issues relying on spellcheckers), but you should check it out.

Update: The version of SpellBound you need to make this work can be found at this MozillaZine forum post. I’ve installed it and it’s awesome — spellcheck as you type in text areas. Super slick!

Also: the Performancing guys are having an ad competition of their own: Hey, we’re not rich, but if someone can come up with a kick-ass logo/ad for us, we’ll happily dole out a $500 cash prize, and if we use it in the app itself, give you credit for that on the about tab, naturally :)

As pointed out in about 1000 other places, the folks over at Performancing have released a fantastic new Firefox extension that turns your browser into a fully-integrated blogging tool that works with a variety of different blogging software. I’m using it right now to post to my custom WordPress install, for example.

You can grab the extension here, and check out the Solution Watch review.

Update: The HTML formatting could use a bit of love, but I’m sure that will come in time :) The HTML formatting is fine if you don’t rely exclusively on the WYSIWYG editor. Neat!

So, the good folks over at Performancing have put together the beginnings of a pretty slick little blogging extension for Firefox.  If you’re curious, you can grab it here.

Note: read the start of the page (above the “Install” button).  That’s where it tells you how to use the extension (hint: F8 and the little clicky button in the lower-right corner of your browser).

The account wizard worked beautifully for my custom WordPress install (you’re soaking in it), which is always a nice thing.

Let’s try some test text: bold, italic, underline, bigger, smaller, link.