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[I use a Mac, so all the images in this post are of the Mac user interface. The UI for other platforms will differ slightly. Click on pictures to view other sizes.]

In Firefox 2 browser history was saved, by default, for nine days. I’m not really sure where that number came from (Why 9? Why not 7 or 10?), but I never found it to be a big deal. All I ever got out of history were links drawn a different color if I had visited them recently, and I don’t recall thinking about, never mind going through the process of, increasing the number of days my history was saved. I rarely looked at it, and never really cared about it much one way or another.

All of this has changed in Firefox 3. Browser history is now incredibly, phenomenally, astonishingly useful.

Smart Location Bar

The primary value of history is now as a key source of data for the Smart Location Bar (affectionately nicknamed the “Awesomebar”) which I talked about in an earlier post, “Awesome bar is awesome“. The Smart Location Bar, in my opinion, is one of the game-changing new features in Firefox 3. Check out my other post for more details, or watch Mike Beltzner demo it (along with a handful of other new Firefox features) in this short screencast.

In addition to the Smart Location Bar, Firefox 3 History has been upgraded and made much more useful in a number of other ways.

History Sidebar

The History sidebar has been updated to match the new look and feel of Firefox 3, taking full advantage of the favicon storage that is part of the new Places back-end technology. You can still search history via the History sidebar, or sort entries by Date + Site, Date, Site, Most Visited, and Last Visited. The entries are much easier to scan and identify, however, because they now display the site’s favicon (a small identifying graphical icon) where those are available.

History Menu

Favicons are also used in the History menu, making it easier to identify items of interest in both lists of currently open and recently closed tabs.

History Library

Most significant, however, is the inclusion of History in the new Firefox Library. The Library is the renamed and expanded Bookmark Organizer, fully revamped for Firefox 3. You open the History section of the Library by going to the History menu, selecting “Show all History”, then clicking on the “History” entry in the top of the left sidebar.

You can do all kinds of stuff in the History Library. You can search all the available entry data with one or more words, and also save your search as a smart folder.

You can view and sort history entries by Name, Tags, Location, Visit Date, Visit Count, Keyword, Description, Added date, or Last Modified date.

History Tagging

You can even tag history entries right in the Library, effectively bookmarking them and adding them to the full bookmarking system.

If you’re not sure whether you’ve already used a tag or not, you can expand the UI to show a full list of all the tags you’ve already used in your bookmarks, and just check off the ones you want to use for the item being tagged.

Once bookmarked, you can add Keywords and a Description right in the Library interface.

Taking advantage of the new and much more efficient Places back-end, the default number of days to save history data has been increased from nine to 90.

I used to clear my browser history as a matter of course, not really caring about that information, and I would create new Firefox profiles all willy-nilly, happy enough to just import my bookmarks and start fresh. With Firefox 3, however, my browser History is suddenly extremely valuable, and incredibly useful in a variety of ways. Clearing history or starting a new profile is now remarkably painful, and not something to be done lightly.

This collection of private, locally-stored, personal, and searchable data has changed how I use the Web, and I can’t imagine ever going back to the old way of doing things. I’ve gone so far as to increase my history storage to a full year. It’s absolutely worth it.

For developers…

If you want to learn more about the new Places back-end and how to develop add-ons for it, start by reading the Places documentation at the Mozilla Developer Center.

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

So we’ve moved. From Ottawa to Moncton…from a 1 bedroom+loft condo with no yard to a 4 bedroom house with a third of an acre…from the capital to the maritimes. The move, while ridiculously stressful, went relatively well. All people and pets made it unscathed, and all our stuff appears to be OK with two notable exceptions. Rob’s acoustic guitar sustained some cosmetic damage and my gaming computer (a carefully designed and lovingly hand-crafted $2500 machine) got utterly destroyed. The machine was dropped hard enough that they managed to bend the frame in multiple places, and most of the rivets and internal screws got sheared off. It’s currently in bits in a box in the basement. I’m not exactly thrilled about this, and I’m especially unthrilled by the hum-hawing and foot dragging the moving company seems to be doing related to the insurance claim.

At this point I’m fairly convinced that all residential moving companies are crooks. Not only did they (the company in question will currently remain nameless) attempt to jack the price of our move by 50% after they had all our stuff (essentially holding it hostage), they’re now trying to tell us that the computer damage isn’t their responsibility. By “not exactly thrilled” I actually mean “seethingly infuriated”, of course. On the bright side, the driver and guys who actually showed up and moved our stuff on and off the truck were great. Everyone else? Not so great.

These are some of our books, temporarily staged in the basement ’til we can figure out a proper shelving solution. They are not organized in any sensible fashion.

We’ve been in the house for about three weeks now, and it’s all good. The worst of the wallpaper has been stripped and the upstairs is all painted. For the first time in over six years we have unpacked all our books, which is satisfying in a pretty fundamental way. I’ve got my little workshop more or less set up, so I should be able to start mucking about with stained glass again soon. And, in spite of the 2.5 feet of hard-packed snow, I’ve ordered herb and tomato seeds. Yes, there are huge piles of snow on everything still, but it’s spring, dammit, and I want my herb garden. I’ll start the seeds inside around mid-April in hopes for a mid-May last frost, but given how lousy this winter has been that may be ambitious.

We’ve also been cooking a lot, including a prime-rib roast, pan-seared sirloin steak, guacamole, tzatziki sauce (on sauted pork tenderloin), a full roast chicken, chicken soup, baked halibut, sausage pasta (one simple tomato sauce, one arrabiata sauce), apple-cinnamon coffee cake, buttermilk biscuits, buttermilk pancakes, french toast, a red curry on rice, a somewhat bland spice cake, various salads and sandwiches, and lots of miniwheats. I really need to start keeping track more carefully, because pretty much everything we’ve had (with exception of the spice cake and the not-curry-enough curry) has been really very good. Today is steak and mushroom quesadilla day, I think, and I might make a mango chutney for later in the week.

Reading-wise, I’ve recently finished Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food which is his follow-up to Omnivore’s Dilemma, both of which are worth reading. I’m partway through Roberton Davies’ Fifth Business, and about 1/3rd of the way through Anthony Everitt’s non-fiction history about Cicero (which is excellent). I’m reading Cicero because I recently finished Robert Harris’ Imperium which is a novel centred around Cicero. I think after I’m finished this Everitt book I’ll crack Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States as my non-fiction selection, and Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth for fiction. We’ll see.

Things are generally winding back down into a more regular routine, which is good — everything has been basically haywire since the week before Christmas (when we put the offer on the house), and I’m pretty sure this is the most extensive bout of stress I’ve dealt with in my life. Very, very much looking forward to the snow melting and getting a bbq and some patio furniture. It’s going to be a great summer.

I use Remember the Milk (RTM) as my personal task organizer and TODO list. It’s fast, simple, flexible enough to be useful, but not so flexible that you end up tweaking the system more than you get things done with the system. Two thumbs up, would buy again, and will buy a Pro membership as soon as there’s a real reason for me to do so.

The folks over at Lifehacker like it a lot, too, and have written a great introduction to getting organized with RTM.

Kev did a nerd test. Now so have I.